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Comment by DerekBickerton | Hacker News Reader

Love how the contributors all have what seems like dedicated accounts with no 'legal name'. Take for example this: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/commits?author=n1474335

    n1474335

Great name. In typical GCHQ style they have good OPSEC.

You can find more contributors here:

https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/graphs/contributors

    d98762625
    s2224834

Among others :)

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Interesting point: They just use Gmail.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/commit/c423de545fd0d27aabe...

You can put anything you want in the author and committer email so this doesn't guarantee that they actually use or even created those gmail accounts.

afaik those are user IDs of Chinese(?) messengers. Devs or others there like to use those as usernames because the are (of course) mostly unique and also enable others to easily contact them.

I don't think in this case it'll be messenger IDs (and if it is definitely not chinese) as GCHQ is the UK's equivalent of the NSA.

They're a pretty secretive bunch, when they present in person they don't use real names, and if you go to their headquarters you have to leave all electronics at the door (did a talk there once and had to buy myself an analog watch for the day!)

Why did you buy an analog watch as opposed to just go without?

I wanted to know what time it was for things like how long till my talk starts and how I was doing for timing. :)

They're defo not Chinese. GCHQ is part of UK Intelligence. They also have the $id@publicemail.provider to hide their emails too.

Chinese messenger ID-as-username mostly starts from q(QQ - counterpart FB Messenger) and s(Sina Weibo - counterpart FB/Twitter). Others(a - admob, b - bilibili etc.) are quite rare tbh so I don't think that's the case here.

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