I had the same thought myself initially, but the analysis suggests a work-week that includes Fri, which precludes Israel (where the work week is Sun-Thu and not Mon-Fri), as well as celebrating Christmas and New Year's which are not official holidays in Israel. It isn't uncommon for younger people to take a day off for New Year's since it is an excuse to party, or for Jews with eastern European origins to celebrate Novy God, but I don't know of any Christmas celebrations.
Obviously these could be faked, but then why fake a Mon-Fri work week and not also fake the work hours to match it? To me it seems like an unlikely hypothesis.
and I believe someone pointed out that there were commits on yom kippur? that is a day basically no one works. The skies are closed, the roads are empty and everyone is bicycling on all the available streets, including highways.
Israel isn't home only for Jewish people who don't work on Yom Kippur, there are significant populations of both Muslims and Chirstians
I don't think that you can rule out any country based on email and commit timestamps, the attacker could have been further east and had a late work day, or further east with an early work day
I hate to defend Israel’s work week here, because it sucks to an unimaginable extent, but while you’re free not to observe Jewish holidays in Israel, unless you’re lucky to live in one of a handful of places you’ll struggle heavily to get anything done on Fri or Sat. If you try, you’ll find nothing works during most of that time including public transport—except for Friday morning when you’re going to have to scramble to get stuff done so you don’t run out of food before Sunday morning. On Yom Kippur, even driving around in your own car is going to get you fined. And, of course, nearly nothing managed by the governments works on the weekend or holidays, except for the military.
(I wouldn’t put it past the intelligence services to keep working during official holidays as a form of obfuscation, mind you. I just wanted to point out that it isn’t as straightforward a deal as Christians—or atheists for that matter—existing: Israel sure makes daily life hard for them.)
I am an Israeli, and I agree with you. I just wanted to point out that trying to speculate a location for the attacker based on what days they worked isn't going to be remotely accurate
Speaking of innacurate things, since the actual XZ git.repository isn't hosted on GitHub, could there be logs of which IP address the attacker was operating from?
I had the same thought myself initially, but the analysis suggests a work-week that includes Fri, which precludes Israel (where the work week is Sun-Thu and not Mon-Fri), as well as celebrating Christmas and New Year's which are not official holidays in Israel. It isn't uncommon for younger people to take a day off for New Year's since it is an excuse to party, or for Jews with eastern European origins to celebrate Novy God, but I don't know of any Christmas celebrations.
Obviously these could be faked, but then why fake a Mon-Fri work week and not also fake the work hours to match it? To me it seems like an unlikely hypothesis.