SIngular they never fell out of usage, but it was considered non-standard English dialect for about three hundred years. Standard formal grammar rules from the 18th century until the last quarter of the 20th defaulted to he/him where gender was unknown or irrelevant. Singular they was grudgingly accepted as standard about ten years ago. Until then, every major style guide forbade singular they in favor of “he or she” or recasting the sentence to avoid pronouns altogether or to semantically justify plural they. Other languages have either found their own solutions or decided that their traditions are good enough and kept them.

Personally, I just avoid pronouns whenever possible, especially if someone is likely to throw a tantrum over an honest mistake due to a lifetime of custom. I’ve never been particularly upset at singular they, but I also don’t take offense if someone follows the older formal grammar rules either. <shrug>

Love the handle, BTW. :)

I think downloading is against Google’s TOS. Whether that makes it illegal is a question for a lawyer.

That’s not unprofessional. That’s just how English works.

I’ve never used a VPN with it either. But it should work, especially with an exit node in a country where Google has no incentive to/is prohibited from interfering with third party viewers.

“You” was both singular and plural throughout the history of Middle English. Singular “they” emerged in Late Middle English around the 14th century.

Same here and agreed. I deeply believe that people deserve equal respect and recognition no matter what form their genitalia takes. This situation is not about respect or recognition. It’s either a personal vendetta or the Eternally Offended and Perpetually Outraged cadre went digging for a new target. Either way, what’s happened here over the past couple of days is wrong.

TIL GitHub doesn’t appear to have a “Block User” function.

Great gods. They did as asked, but they weren’t sorry enough? I don’t even know what the complaint is. I’m obviously not the only one.

Political correctness makes my teeth hurt.

This whole thing has jilted-lover vibes. There is no other reasonable explanation for dredging up a three-year-old PR denial than simply shit-stirring for the sake of trying to embarrass or hurt the dev in some way. It reeks of simple childish revenge.

Arguably, it’s more like someone is able to hide the door altogether and force you to climb through the less-well-secured window. The fact that they can hide the door at all makes its locks meaningless.

I get that this is an inherent problem of security mechanisms in general and not of passkeys in particular. But it still reduces passkeys to just fancy passwords. They’re obviously not any more reliable in practice.

I mean, good that the tribunal exists and good that they took the case seriously.

I haven’t either because I don’t see the advantage. Cases like this show that there may not be any.

If The Next Big Thing can be sidelined by simply blocking its login option, that’s a problem. Not only is it not secure, it’s not even reliably usable.

Wait, haven’t some sources been touting how ultra-secure and unbreakable passkeys are? And now we find that they’re susceptible to comparatively simple MITM attacks?

That isn’t even remotely what it says.

Short of buying the IP catalog, Microsoft seems to be doing right here.

They’d have to pay me seven figures to put up with that.

Bless you. I do have them blocked. I don’t need the aggravation in my life.

If you trust the government that controls a TLD, then use the site. If not, proceed with caution.

Yeah, it is. We used to say they were taking a break, but I guess that didn’t sound urgent enough.