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Re:Excellent succinct breakdown of the xz mess, from an Open... by throwanem on Friday April 05, 2024 @12:38PM (#39944443)
None of those adequately explain these commits. This is no exception to Hanlon's razor.
Re:Excellent succinct breakdown of the xz mess, from an Open... by francescovv on Friday April 05, 2024 @01:23PM (#39944895)
Hanlon's razor is useful to curb one's paranoia, but it is far from being a universal rule.

In fact, malice and incompetence are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

This very incident shows several instances where "Jia Tan" is being arguably incompetent, in addition to being clearly malicious: unintended breakage by adding extra space between "return" and "is_arch_extension_supported"; several redundant checks for `uname` == "Linux"; botched payload, so "test files" had to be replaced, with pretty fishy explanation; rather inefficient/slow GOT parsing, list goes on...

Re:Excellent succinct breakdown of the xz mess, from an Open... by narrator on Friday April 05, 2024 @01:24PM (#39944901)
Hanlon's razor lets every single first degree murderer off the hook, or any other of the many crimes where you have to establish intent to convict.
Re:Excellent succinct breakdown of the xz mess, from an Open... by throwanem on Friday April 05, 2024 @01:34PM (#39945009)
It is a rule-of-thumb heuristic, not a law.

Even if this weren't the case, your claim would remain specious. "Establish intent" and "justify attribution to malice" are the same thing said two ways.