Jai Tan's commit history on his github profile suggests he took off for Christmas, new years, and spring break. I smell an American.

Sometimes you smell an American because someone wanted you to smell an American.

Operating on a target region schedule doesn't seem particularly sophisticated, at least compared to the all the efforts put into this exploit.

Interesting. Is there also a pattern in the times of day? (I don't so much mean the times in commits done by the developer because they can be fake. I'd be more interested in authentic times recorded by GitHub, if any such times are publicly accessible.)

Another thing would be to examine everything ever written by the user for linguistic clues. This might point towards particular native languages or a particular variant of English or towards there being several different authors.

Someone said commits lined up with Beijing time, but I've not verified that.

But that wouldn't count for much, someone employed by anyone could work any hours.

Also git actually stores the timezone information. You could see it is consistently China time (GMT+8).

P.S. could be Taiwanese as China and Taiwan share the same timezone.

Below are links to the git mailbox files where you could see the timezone.

From 2022:

- https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/commit/c6977e740008817...

- https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/commit/7c16e312cb2f40b...

From 2024:

- https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/commit/af071ef7702debe...

- https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/commit/a4f2e20d8466369...

That timezone information is provided by whoever created the commits so cannot be trusted to be correct. Considering the chosen alias it's not unexpected that the timezone information was also made to look Chinese.

So could be the holiday inactivity. I'd expect multiple layers of country obfuscation as well as conflicting information to confuse you. Or none. Impossible to know for sure.

Maybe it's a Western Australian, or Indonesian, or Thai...

GMT+8 covers a lot of places

I almost froze my credit a week before closing on my first house because of this breach.

3D printing. I picked up an ANET A8 about a year ago. It was the cheapest printer available at the time. I had absolutely no idea how hard it was to keep these things running smoothly. They are like very challenging puzzles that constantly need resolving. Issues like temperature, alignment, vibration, etc which all affect the quality of your print. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at it, but I enjoy it still.