Recently, Linux removed several people from their organization that have Russian email addresses. Linus made a statement that confirmed this was done intentionally. I believe that there was some mention of following sanctions on Russia due to the war. I haven’t looked into the details of it all, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. From what I understand, it sounded like it was only Russian maintainers that were removed and normal users submitting code from Russia can still contribute. Maintainers have elevated permissions and can control what code gets accepted into a project, meaning that a bad actor could allow some malicious code to sneak past. This may have also contributed to the decision since this type of attack has happened before and Russia seems like a likely culprit. The reactions to this change have been varied. Some people feel it is somewhat justified or reasonable, some people think that it means it is no longer open source, and some people think it is unfairly punishing Russian civilians (it is worth noting that that is part of the point of sanctions).

I had an issue where a client reported a crash on login. The exception and stack trace reported were very generic and lent no clues to the cause. I tried debugging but could not reproduce. I eventually figured out that the crash only happened for release (non-debug) builds that were obfuscated. I couldn’t find the troublesome code, so I figured out which release introduced the issue, then which commit, then went change by change until I was able to find the cause. It turned out to be a log message in a location that was completely unrelated to login. That exact log message was fine a few lines up. Other code worked fine in that location. For some unknown reason, having that log message in that specific location caused a crash in a completely different area of code.

It was obfuscated only in the release build. The issue is that they have a system to send certain logs to an API so they can refer to them if a user has an issue that needs further investigation. Unfortunately, their target audience is not very tech literate and have a hard time explaining how they got into a situation where they experienced a bug, so the remote logging was a way to allow us to try to retrace the user’s steps. Some of the logs that get sent to the API have JSON values converted from class data, will refer directly to class names, etc, and those logs had the obfuscated names.

I have a somewhat related real world story. I had a client that was convinced that tons of people were going to decompile their application and sell their own version of the program, so they insisted that they needed their code obfuscated to protect company secrets and make it harder to reverse engineer. I tried explaining to them that obfuscation wasn’t that big of a deterrent to someone attempting to steal code through reverse engineering and that it would likely cause some issues with debugging, but they were certain they needed it. Sure enough, they then had a real user run into an issue and were surprised to find that their custom logging system was close to useless because the application was outputting random obfuscated letters instead of function and variable names. We did have mapping files, but it took a lot of time to map each log message to make it readable enough to try to understand the user’s issue.

I have a Funko Pop of the “This is Fine” dog on my desk at work because there are times where I’m really feeling that way.

I’ve heard those chairs are super nice and super expensive. Great find!

On one hand, I agree that the story could and should contain more info about the positives of the club to really show people what it’s like. I’ve read similar articles about other school districts that have the club, and they often give few details about the actual club, which is frustrating. On the other hand, I understand why the author chose to focus on what they did. If this club was established and everyone was cool with it, it likely wouldn’t receive an article in a national publication because that’s not very noteworthy. The news story in this case isn’t about the club being formed; it’s about the backlash to the club being formed, and that’s what they’re going to focus on. I’m not saying it should be that way (I like having a more complete picture of what’s going on), but focusing on one aspect of a story and ignoring others is often how it appears to be when reading news.

Your comment about the jet program reminded me of something I read once about the US military trying to conceal a top secret jet (I think it was the SR-71) from spy satellites. The thing I read said that the planes heated up the runway where they sat, which would show up on thermal images of the runways. Iirc, they would go out and heat the runways further to make it seem like there were more planes or to change the shape of the heat signature.

This is based entirely off of memory, and I can’t find the right search terms to look for more info, so take it with a grain of salt.