I didn't downvote you either. I agree with your premise. However, I think using the words "security theatre" is inflammatory and overly pessimistic, which is wh

I didn't downvote you either. I agree with your premise. However, I think using the words "security theatre" is inflammatory and overly pessimistic, which is why you're getting downvoted. Generally the general feeling here on that word has a negative connotation associated with things like the TSA and mandating backdoors (something I agree with). However, I do not believe (and the majority of HN, most likely) that GH is actively being malicious adding this feature in. You do have some points: you should only do GPG verification on machines that you trust. This is true, I think we can all agree. However, you say it may train users to ignore checking locally, which remains to be seen. Further, there are some counter points that you're not considering: (1) this move gives huge publicity to gpg signing of commits, which hopefully encourage more people to sign their commits and tags, which hopefully should promote better security. (2) Absolute trusted hardware is hard to come by these days. At the moment, we do not suspect that Github is actively working against us. We can therefore trust GH to display the correct verified tag, for now. If you want to go down the absolute security route, you'll realize that you absolutely cannot trust your own machines either (at least a majority of us cannot). This brings you to a tricky situation where there is no where safe to run GPG. Then what? I think the pessimistic view you presented shares similar ideologies as the view that iMessage can be easily broken because Apple can simply swap out keys. While I agree that this is a concern, I still think that this move by GH is overall positive, just like iMessage is overall a positive step to secure messaging. Incremental steps are good imo and we'll see where this takes us.