[pabs3]

> someone (or something) who's concealing their identity has nothing to gain from recognition

The xz supply chain attacker hid their real identity, created fakes one and gained recognition over time in order to gain more access and add the backdoor. So TLAs and other bad actors at least are interested in gaining recognition.

[jart]

I know, right? It's like, finally—a threat actor who's intelligent enough to understand what capital means in the open source community and is willing to devote resources to engage with it authentically (even if it's for evil nefarious ends). The xz incident showed that the open source community has many other good defense mechanisms for verifying and spotting malicious work and then solving it. But we won't even get to play that game if we're inundated with anonymous agent spam so that GitHub can juice its MAU numbers. Maybe they should require every account buy a $40 yubikey. I don't know what the answer is. But I know that no one gains when your measure of success is driving the cost of burning open source developers out down to literally zero.

[pabs3]

The xz incident was only discovered by accident, not by someone actually verifying the tarball and test cases were not malicious. We still don't have verification of tarball build reproducibility anywhere. The closest you can get to verified builds is what the bootstrappable builds community built in hex0/stage0, and what stagex built on top of that. I'm guessing even they haven't read through all that source code though. There aren't even good tools for distributing reviews, there is crev, but the stagex folks think it has some deficiencies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701394

[pabs3]

I don't know what the solution to slop is. Maybe the bubble will implode at some point. Until then, just close down issues/pulls or remove projects from GitHub I guess.