• Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    7 months ago

    Via https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

    They found this particularly interesting as Cheong is new information. I’ve now learned from another source that Cheong isn’t Mandarin, it’s Cantonese. This source theorizes that Cheong is a variant of the 張 surname, as “eong” matches Jyutping (a Cantonese romanisation standard) and “Cheung” is pretty common in Hong Kong as an official surname romanisation. A third source has alerted me that “Jia” is Mandarin (as Cantonese rarely uses J and especially not Ji). The Tan last name is possible in Mandarin, but is most common for the Hokkien Chinese dialect pronunciation of the character 陳 (Cantonese: Chan, Mandarin: Chen). It’s most likely our actor simply mashed plausible sounding Chinese names together.

    • xantoxis@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      7 months ago

      Wild, so it would suggest that the actor wasn’t Chinese at all. An authentic Chinese person probably wouldn’t choose a name that sounded like that, any more than I would name myself Sean MacBerkowitz, it would just sound wrong.

      A random name generator might produce something like this, of course, if it wasn’t programmed to be too picky.

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        Or they are Chinese, and pick non-authentic Chinese names so people wouldn’t suspect them? I don’t think looking at the name can be a great way to identify the source.

        This attack is clearly sophisticate: the attacker(s) are probably well-trained in obscuring their identity to not reveal much info from their name picks. Say, just use a random name generator.