The response seems a lazy, thoughtless, self-serving cop-out, one that permits a false identity claim and then pushes the entire burden of challenging it back t

The response seems a lazy, thoughtless, self-serving cop-out, one that permits a false identity claim and then pushes the entire burden of challenging it back to the primary victim, who may well be unwitting, and where secondary victims (anyone defrauded by believing a false attribution) have no standing at all. You can file the whole line of thinking - from design to support - under "worst practices" and "things not to emulate in your own product". When it comes to handling how unverified author identity is presented and cross-reference, Github could stand to do a lot better. Fortunately, the problem appears confined to Github's web interface; a git show --quiet e83c516 still produces Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Date: Thu Apr 7 15:13:13 2005 -0700 Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell