In all fairness paranoia is important in things like finding someone trying to slip a backdoor into xz. Going by the most recent Windows 11 update, Microsoft seems to be “we’ll fix it in production”.
Well it wasn’t so much paranoia as obsession. The person who found it wasn’t paranoid, they just went “Why is my connection taking a quarter of a second longer than it used to? This is unacceptable!!!”
I mean, small things like that add up, you want your stack as optimized as possible
A quarter of a second here, another quarter there, and suddenly it might take 2 seconds longer for a connection to form, which matters a ton. A lot of work in the modern web is going into reducing latency
Technically they thought they might have introduced a bug that caused the delay / a regression and set about investigating it. Pretty sure it was a Microsoft developer too.
In all fairness paranoia is important in things like finding someone trying to slip a backdoor into xz. Going by the most recent Windows 11 update, Microsoft seems to be “we’ll fix it in production”.
Well it wasn’t so much paranoia as obsession. The person who found it wasn’t paranoid, they just went “Why is my connection taking a quarter of a second longer than it used to? This is unacceptable!!!”
I mean, small things like that add up, you want your stack as optimized as possible
A quarter of a second here, another quarter there, and suddenly it might take 2 seconds longer for a connection to form, which matters a ton. A lot of work in the modern web is going into reducing latency
Technically they thought they might have introduced a bug that caused the delay / a regression and set about investigating it. Pretty sure it was a Microsoft developer too.
Indeed it was, a PostgreSQL dev by the name of Andres Freund.