Reading about this xz backdoor story from the outside as a person who is still learning much about the technical ins and outs, but as a psychologist it is just overwhelming to imagine a maintainer in this position and all of the feelings of pressure and skill based identity and social isolation that must be involved.

Imho psychology has a duty to show up for technology practitioners and work for them just like we see and work for the well-being of emergency workers, healthcare providers.

@grimalkina the part that stood out to me was that the decision from the poor maintainer to hand over the maintainership to the malicious actor was… expedited by a slew of psyops abuse from various sockpuppet accounts that were *absolutely indistinguishable* from the demands that OSS maintainers of popular packets get on a routine basis.

e.g.: https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00568.html

Re: [xz-devel] XZ for Java