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Comment by happimess | Hacker News Reader

It is worth remembering that part of the case against Mr. Aleynikov involves his use of "subversion" software, which sounds, well, subversive.

From the Vanity Fair article[1]:

"The Web site Serge had used (which has the word 'subversion' in its name) as well as the location of its server (Germany) McSwain clearly found highly suspicious."

[1]http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

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Wow, thanks for pointing that out.. that makes this reporting look pretty laughable, and wildly uninformed: "..through a so-called 'subversion repository'.." Apparently I can add "not looking suspicious" to a list of reasons to use git.

Sergey must not have visited HN, because it seems safe to say had they found that in the browser history it would have been mentioned as well.

Eh, I mean, the URL is news.ycombinator.com which is pretty innocuous.

"Hacker News" is just in the title of the HTML document.

I would have thought the same about SVN.. When confronted with a mixture of money, ignorance and fear, all bets are off.

noun 1. British Slang. a foolish or contemptible person.

I would say Source Safe is your best bet.

Ahh, thanks, good looking out. "safe" seems like an additional layer of perceived good intentions.

It could also mean you have something to hide. Something of great value.

Yep, that's about par for the course reporting. If it sounds ominous, it must be. I remember a small town newspaper that was all mad 10+ years ago about the master / slave IDE toggle and how it was racist. It was not an Onion article, sadly.

This quote was not about the reporter or the news outlet. Michael McSwain was the FBI agent in charge of the case, and the reporting seems to suggest that having 'subversion' in Sergey's Web history was a component of building probable cause.

Remind me to write a a source code control system called "Patriot". I really don't want to know what they think of "git".

On a serious note, I guess the modern lesson is names are used by idiots to attack us so pick your project names carefully.

"Patriot is binary-compatible with Git ..."

  sudo cp /usr/bin/git /usr/bin/patriot

... of course that is likely not enough, as all the porcelain still says "git". ;)

It wasn't a small town, it was Los Angeles County.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/

I thought I saw the article in some small town newspaper. Oh well, I guess the memory isn't quite as good. I swear it was a weird editorial.

I believe that stemmed from a lawsuit by a woman who took offense to those terms being used in some documentation that unfortunately passed through her hands.

Oh god... Thanks for pointing that out, hilarious and saddening at the same time.

Is the emphasis on the word "subversion" from McSwain, or is it from the author of the article? It's not made clear from the text which one of them is emphasizing that part.

To my ear, it seems that the emphasis comes from the FBI agent. The reporter keeps a fairly neutral voice, but the paragraph quoted, combined with the ones immediately before and after, paint the FBI agent as uninformed and credulous.

I was wondering why everyone calls it svn now.

I am not sure this issue has anything to do with that. I believe it is called svn because it was replacing cvs and developers do so love symmetry.

And developers love TLAs (Three letter acronyms!)

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