We have a name! And a logo!
It’s been more than half a year since the WNBA announced that the Golden State Warriors ownership group would be granted an expansion team in San Francisco. And it’s been over a week since that expansion team, then unnamed, announced Ohemaa Nyanin as their inaugural GM.
And now, on the day that the 2024 WNBA season tips off — the final season before Golden State enters the fray — we know the name for the Bay Area’s WNBA squad.
On Tuesday morning, the team officially announced their name, logo, and color scheme. And so we welcome the newest member of Bay Area sports: the Golden State Valkyries.
Check it out:
A combination of strength and grace, the Golden State Valkyries are writing the next chapter in the epic tale of the WNBA. pic.twitter.com/25NVgnBmU6
— Golden State Valkyries (@wnbagoldenstate) May 14, 2024
The Valkyries went all-in on day one marketing, as they certainly should, even getting Kehlani to narrate their inspiring introductory video.
We are the Golden State Valkyries
— Golden State Valkyries (@wnbagoldenstate) May 14, 2024
Narrated by Kehlani pic.twitter.com/VGY0AAJKa5
They also shared the ins and outs of the gorgeous, highly-detailed logo.
The beauty is in the details. pic.twitter.com/6u3INGX6dS
— Golden State Valkyries (@wnbagoldenstate) May 14, 2024
— Golden State Valkyries (@wnbagoldenstate) May 14, 2024
And they snapped a few pictures of Warriors players repping the gear of their sister team.
Squad is already reppin’!
— Golden State Warriors (@warriors) May 14, 2024
Welcome to the family, Golden State Valkyries pic.twitter.com/kNLMsChN3d
The Valkyries made the choice to start fresh with their own color scheme, rather than follow the Warriors’ color scheme. That’s a choice that some will certainly criticize, though I like it. There are obvious ties between the two organizations, from the city and arena they call home, to the ownership group, to the name — Dictionary.com defines “valkyrie” as “any of the beautiful maidens attendant upon Odin who bring the souls of slain warriors chosen by Odin or Tyr to Valhalla and there wait upon them” (emphasis mine) — and I like the WNBA squad getting a chance to brand independently with their own colors.
We’ll unfortunately have to wait to see those colors on the court, as the Valkyries won’t debut until the 2025 WNBA season. But hey, that’s only a year away now! And if you’re planning on following the Valkyries but are new to the WNBA, I strongly recommend following the league this year — it’s an absolute joy, and League Pass is incredibly affordable.
[“Ladycocks” is right out.]
Last night, the 2024 women’s college basketball tournament concluded, with the South Carolina Gamecocks defeating the Iowa Hawkeyes. Aside from the recent success of the women’s basketball program, sports teams from the University of South Carolina have not been particularly good historically. Though the school was founded in 1801, South Carolina’s first national championship in any sport didn’t come until two centuries later, in 2002. Nevertheless, in the ’90s, apparel from the school was very popular. Specifically, this classy cap was a common sight hundreds of miles away in New Jersey:
Another oft-spotted headwear option in that area originated from a school thousands of miles across the country, Oregon State:
I present without comment the fact that this image originated from Dicks.com.1
Both of these are a style called the “Bar” hat, made by sportswear brand “The Game”. Bar hats were particularly popular at the end of the 20th century, displaying the names or nicknames of dozens of different colleges and their sports teams. The two above, however, were particularly widespread sources of juvenile japery. Yes, many an adolescent boy strolled into Lids at their closest Garden State mall to purchase a hat featuring a slang term for genitalia.
I was a teenager myself in that era, but I wanted a different option. In an effort to subvert the puerile humor of others, I sought out the single goofiest Bar hat I could find. After much contemplation, I opted to rep the University of California, Santa Cruz:
Go Banana Slugs!4
Back to South Carolina, though, and their matchup last night. I know that a “hawkeye” is “a native of Iowa”, a much cooler demonym than “Iowan”. However, I recently had the realization that I wasn’t sure what a “gamecock” was. So, I looked it up, which revealed that it means “a rooster of the domestic chicken trained for fighting”. Oh.
And also, yikes. On multiple levels, that’s a terrible name for one of the best women’s college basketball teams in the country.
Footnotes:
Speaking of which, there’s a recent TV ad for the company that has repeatedly caught my attention.2 When Will Arnett says “Have I heard of Dicks.com?!”, it sounds like he’s about to launch into an epically filthy joke.3↩︎
That ad is archived here. ↩︎
A friend-of-the-site who shall remain anonymous informed me that once upon a time, Dick’s Sporting Goods did not own the Dicks.com domain name. It was, in fact, porn, as Archive.org can show you, if you really feel the need to confirm it, or you’re just feeling lonely.
It appears the retailer took ownership of the domain around the beginning of 2011.↩︎
Old school netizens know that banana slugs are fearsome, and indeed, one of the most vicious and pathological predators of human beings on the planet. ↩︎
As someone who has been messing with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on top of his normal installation of Nobara Linux, I knew this was serious when I did an update yesterday, and it forced me to re-download nearly 3,000 packages in a single sitting.
(Tedium doesn’t do April Fool’s jokes. This actually happened.)
A rolling-release variant of Linux, Tumbleweed is a good distro, one that takes security very seriously while putting you up against the edge of what’s possible (and not feeling a little rough around the edges, like Arch can sometimes feel). But like many other distros, its makers found themselves freaking out over the weekend after it was realized that someone had dropped a backdoor into the latest version of xz Utils, an extremely common compression program. The backdoor added a payload into the SSH protocol that could have been broadly exploited. (For those with technical knowledge who want to see how it works, check it out here.)
For Windows or Mac users, this would be the equivalent of someone hacking how the ZIP format works. Many major software programs for the Linux ecosystem are distributed as xz-compressed tarball files. While also used on other operating systems such as Windows, MacOS, and FreeBSD, it is deeply integrated in the way Linux works. If broadly spread, this would cause chaos and essentially leave a backdoor in nearly all Linux clients, and by extension would have affected all the software that relies on Linux, from cloud apps to software-as-a-service platforms. By sheer chance it was uncovered by someone knowledgeable who noticed the SSH process running a little funny.
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This is probably the biggest Linux-centric security problem we’ve seen since at least Heartbleed, a bug affecting OpenSSL which hit almost exactly a decade ago and was such a big deal that it got its own name and branding. As supply chain attacks go, it’s one of the most consequential, because it would have nailed basically every computer running a recent version of Linux—servers, desktops, and everything in-between.
And surprisingly, the system worked. The payload only lasted for a few days before it was caught and removed, and was only placed there because a malicious user named Jia Tan played an extra-long game to get it in, spending more than two years contributing to xz and seemingly using a sock puppet to convince the maintainer to bring on an additional help. That sock puppet, using the name “Jigar Kumar,” leveraged a public admission of mental health issues on the part of developer Lasse Collin to push him to bring in the additional assistance.
“It's also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project,” Collin tried to emphasize in a thread that has been heavily scrutinized in retrospect.
Kumar wasn’t having it.
“The only progress since april has been small changes to test code,” the user replied in an unsympathetic tone. “You ignore the many patches bit rotting away on this mailing list. Right now you choke your repo.”
Knowing what we know now, it is clear that Collin was being played, with his personal challenges and honesty being held against him—and that allowed an apparent state actor to burrow into the Linux project. It was only an extremely prominent Linux user—ironically, an employee of Microsoft—that caught it.
The scary part is, in the decade since Heartbleed, it perhaps feels like, on the surface, we have not learned very much. We’re still stuck with under-funded, under-supported projects that undergird the whole apparatus, with software like OpenSSL and xz not being front of mind despite the fact that they play incredibly important roles. The social engineering aspect of what happened to xz, which allowed a bad actor to maintain a role in the project for years, points to a lack of vetting in open source. Which, to be fair, strikes at the delicate balance FOSS plays. You want the projects to be open enough that anyone can take part, but because this technology is used by so many people, it has to be managed correctly.
Large companies can help, but they can only do so much. Each of those 3,000ish packages has a group of maintainers behind them, many working on the software during their free time, basing their work on donations in sometimes underappreciated circumstances. (On the plus side, the situation that affected xz has people talking about solutions.)
If the right infiltrator taps the right card, the whole thing crumbles.
The Verge dives into the mess around Vice.
A reminder that, try as every single marketer might on April Fool’s Day, the best bait-and-switch was actually the series finale of Newhart.
Gmail turns 20 today. Over at Inc., a look at how one user complaint shaped what has become a bedrock service of the internet.
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