> When you send me an email, please provide at least two SNS [social networking service] addresses (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter) for verification purposes. ... I no longer accept contact from anonymous individuals.
It's pretty sad to see that social networking is being adopted as an identification and trust mechanism even by technical people. It was bad enough when some governments began demanding social networking usernames for visa/immigrant screening, but we can't even send an email without social proof to other technical people now?
> I no longer accept contact from anonymous individuals.
This reminds of that joke, where a guy shows up at the Air Force HQ recruitment center. They ask, "Pilot license? Experience? Qualifications?" He replies, "Nope, just here to say: Don't count on me!"
With the ellipsis expanded: "Due to the XZ backdoor incident, I no longer accept contact from anonymous individuals."
The XZ cracker could have logged in via GitHub at numerous services. I bet that the OP downloads from PyPI that was potentially compromised for longer than a year due to an overlooked token leak.
I further bet that the OP, being in the machine learning space, downloads unauditable, huge Python frameworks from GitHub, conda or PyPI.
People in that space also download and experiment with untrusted models.
But hey, plain text email which you can read in a command line mail client with MIME and other extensions disabled is the problem!
It's pretty sad to see that social networking is being adopted as an identification and trust mechanism even by technical people. It was bad enough when some governments began demanding social networking usernames for visa/immigrant screening, but we can't even send an email without social proof to other technical people now?