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Article from Issue 256/2022
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Users of the colors.js color conversion library were surprised recently when their printers started to print "Liberty Liberty Liberty…" and then began spewing random characters in an infinite loop.

Dear Reader,

Users of the colors.js color conversion library were surprised recently when their printers started to print "Liberty Liberty Liberty…" and then began spewing random characters in an infinite loop. The weird appearance of the printed page made those users wonder if a vandal had broken into the source code, but the truth that began to emerge was much stranger.

It turns out that the developer of the colors.js and faker.js libraries sabotaged the code himself. Marak Squires had apparently become disillusioned with the way large companies were using his code without contributing or providing compensation. On November 2020, he wrote on the faker.js GitHub page, "Respectfully, I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s (and other smaller-sized companies) with my free work. There isn't much else to say….Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it."

[...]

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