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I don't know how, but this wank is definitely LJ's fault.

It all started simply enough: a spam email lands in a cryptography software mailing list. It turns out the sender got hacked. One person helpfully suggests using a stronger password in the future. End of story, right?

Ohoho, of course not. This is the Internet.

Dumping GShit would have been my first choice.

Okay, clearly something he hates is involved here, but I had no idea what it was. Is it GLib? Is there some kind of contempt in the security community for GNOME-based email clients and he's blaming the hack on their shoddy software? If you get past the urge to cover your ears and say omgdunswear, you might be puzzled and ask what is going on here?

His response can only be described as what would happen if anecdata, post hoc ergo propter hoc, confounding variables and J. Jonah Jameson Jr. had a baby. Somehow, even though the hacked person's email ends in @hotmail.co.uk, this is all ~~Spider-man's~~ GMail's fault:

I think you are misunderstanding what I am inferring. For starters, that is the 5th account that I have heard or known of that was hacked in March alone. I am sure that the total is far higher based on a simple statistical accounting of the number of accounts using GMail. Happy Rob :)
[...]
By the way Rob, and I mean nothing personal, my reference to GMail as GShit is fully in accordance with the how Microsoft has its registered name distorted into something entirely different on virtually every FOSS forum I have ever read. Google, in my opinion, is worse than Microsoft in many respects. If we are free to slander one entity by creating an aberration of its name, then certainly that right extends to all similar entities. I was certainly not attempting to offend you personally.

Just my 2¢.

Aaron responds with what's either the most polite or the most subtly sarcastic version of 'Cool Story Bro' I've ever seen, while pointing out the glaring obvious that while Aaron is using GMail, the actual hacking victim is not. At least we all know how you feel about Gmail though.

Aaand we have Snacky's law:

If it bothers you that Microsoft's corporate name gets turned into puerile jokes, it seems the way to counter that is to correct people when they do it. Otherwise you're just raising the stakes of childishness. Other people who come along will see your comments and feel there's nothing wrong with slinging some mud at their own personal subject of distaste, and the next thing you know we're all back in the monkey house flinging poo at each other.

I had a miserable time in high school. I left that behind me almost twenty years ago: I have no desire to see us revert back to that level of thinking.

The thread peaks with a smackdown of actual logic.

You seem to be inferring that the high number of hacked Google accounts is due to the high number of Google accounts, which would not support your apparent theory that it is because of the insafety of a Google account. But that is beside the point, although it might make Rob slightly happier.

That was all just in good fun, I don't want to start bickering about it.

But why in [insert deity of choice]'s name do you think Google had anything to do with a hacked hotmail.co.uk account? I receive this mailing list in digest form, and though I immediately curiously tried to access the full headers for the last few messages from Lee, I (re)discovered the mailing list sadly scrubs away all the nice headers. Doesn't it scrub when you select another delivery mode, and did you see a Google header there? And why does that make you sure the hack itself was through a Google service?

Small, I know, but it's just so completely ridiculous.