the lesson *I'm* choosing to take from xz, as an oss maintainer, is that anyone trying to pressure or guilt me into doing something should immediately be told no, for security reasons
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.
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.
Via https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor
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.