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Maybe they weren't all sockpuppets. Here Jigar Kumar was nitpicking Jia Tan's changes:

https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00556.h...

That was not necessary to gain trust. Writing style is different, too. Later when Jia gained commit access he reminds him to merge it.

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This looks like a very phony "debate".

I think the most convincing case made about the sock puppets is around account creation dates, and also people disappearing after they get what they need. Like Jigar disappearing after Jia becomes maintainer. Or the guy "misoeater19" who creates his debian bug tracker account to say that his work is totally blocked on needing xz 5.6.1 to be in debian unstable.

Ah, the good ol’ lever of urgency. Urgency frequency smells of deception.

that's precisely what sock puppetry does ... talk/write in a different writing style to make others believe it's different people.

For all we know there is a whole cyber-squadron (or whatever their military units are called) behind Jia Tan and other accounts.

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