I’m not really convinced. I haven’t seen anything outside the capabilities of a talented individual, and such an exploit would be worth a lot of money, so the motivation is there.

Because it’s fake, it’s a joke about that GitHub troll a couple weeks ago

The difficulty of sending patches or reporting issues to the Linux kernel is a feature for them, as it keeps less-experienced devs from wasting maintainer’s time with garbage requests. For most projects it’s a bug.

This isn’t KYC, it’s “prove you’re a human”.

Is everyone running their own open source project?

Essentially, I suppose. I put most of my personal projects on GitHub because a) I believe in the open-source philosophy generally and b) sometimes they are helpful to others! For example, because I put SmilApple on GitHub, someone was able to adapt it to make this. And besides, it’s a great way to distribute programs that you want other people to use, like my current project Chokistream, or when I made a fan-translation of a game. None of these are “serious” projects like a new framework or something, and all of them have very limited audiences, but if I’m coding them, I might as well publish them where someone else might be able to benefit from them. I also don’t feel like they’re important for my career, but they’re important for their own sake and I would care if I lost them.

Make their birthday a magic number

It’s called the “US Patent and Trademark Office”, so they must be basically the same thing, right‽

R uses paste0() for some reason