This is clearly on the darker side of gray-hat. Hate to be preachy but anyone seeking to emulate this sort of attack-finding should consider their ethical obligations as a computer scientist and follow best practices for responsible disclosure. It appears this was completely ignored here, including sharing stolen sensitive data of normal people with whoever can plead a case.
Am I missing something? It seems Maia didn't share the data at all, and only offers to if someone can demonstrate they will use it responsibly.
Moreover, depending on the contents of the list, this likely offers proof of what is generally suspected, that the no fly list is a form of discrimination and authoritarian overreach, targeting people that haven't been convicted of a crime but are "suspected" due to race, religion, etc. The whole thing is probably unconstitutional/illegal, but it's hard to prove that since it's been secret.
This seems like a clear case of hacktivism- trying to expose an unethical government program for what it is, so that it can be stopped.
We're talking about a no fly list which every airline in the world has a copy of. There's at the very least hundreds, if not 10s of thousands, of employees of airlines alone that have access to this list.
If people had such an innate propensity to divulge secrets, surely the employees who setup that faulty jenkins server would have already sent you a copy of the no fly list, right?
And I would agree that it has been leaked, probably a lot, and that any halfway competent government intelligence agency in the world has copies if they feel they need them.
That isn't really a counter-example to my point which is just that it is stupidly naive to suggest that Maia is somehow exempt from these concerns.
If you want to argue that its all pointless secrecy theater, then I'd agree with that entirely.
Probably thousands of airline and US government employees have had access to this list over the years. Yet neither you nor me can see anything on it, here in January 2023.
This is why such a list should be public. You don't trust random grey hat hacker at .gay TLD to distribute the list to people who won't do harm with it. I don't trust the government to not distribute it, accidentally or otherwise, to people who want to do harm with it.
In fact, the government does do harm with it, by putting people on it without telling them (they might send a letter, that's not guaranteed), and you only get to find out a few hours before your flight when you get rejected at security.
Furthermore, this particular government fails to properly secure info all the time. Seems the last two presidents have been just leaving classified papers strewn all over the place.
No, I'll trust the gay hackers over the government, thank you very much.
Sure. But that isn't the naive position that just because someone is Good(tm) that they will be careful with secrets. That's just the position that keeping secrets and having Kafkaesque bullshit is itself bad, so it doesn't matter, and the right thing to do is just post it on a pastebin hosted in Russia and call it a day.
Depends what exactly they mean with "demonstrate". It can mean email from J. Random Person with "pinky promise I will use this list for good", or it can mean "well-known journalist with a clear public track record".
The problem is to define "demonstrate" and the criteria. Remember the gatekeeper is now an unemployed gal who "know lot's of things about cyber security" according to her main page. Seems likely a competent bad actor could easily impersonate a well-meaning reporter...
Yes, security through obscurity isn't security, but this also seems incredibly irresponsible for any "security researcher". AFAIK, just basic standard good practice is to report the flaws and allow a reasonable interval before publishing, and there seems to be no hint of this.
Modern society really is held together with duct tape, baling twine, and a few pieces of bubble gum...
>>Remember the gatekeeper is now [...] unemployed [...] who "know lot's of things about cyber security" according to [its] main page. Seems likely a competent bad actor could easily impersonate a well-meaning reporter...
Good to see that; thanks for digging deeper. I hope he has done this behind the scenes and the holes are patched, because I'm sure that by now, someone with worse intent has already followed those footsteps...
> CommuteAir added that the server, which was taken offline prior to publication after being flagged by the Daily Dot, did not expose any customer information based on an initial investigation.
If TFA (may not be accessible right now) is to be believed, “the” server is a very generous understatement of the size of the exposed infrastructure, and customer information was very much accessible if not accessed per maia’s words. So seeing a statement like this from the CommuteAir PR people actually makes me feel less reassured, not more. (The attacking side looks better so far—maia itself is not a “watch the world burn” type, judging from its breach history, even if its writing makes you wonder whether the absurdist parody is deliberate or the author is in fact slightly manic. Kind of like Justine Tunney.)
> Stealing source code and making it public isn't really helping anyone, most likely this is just an ego-inflation bragging exercise... A lot of these so-called hacktivists claim noble goals but then it later transpires to be down to other more selfish reasons,
There are a lot of ways a hacker can get attention and gain notoriety to inflate their ego. They could be causing harm to people, breaking things, causing chaos, and spreading lies. There are a lot of invisible whitehats around doing good out there. The evil stuff stands out a lot more. Responsibly reporting the data leak issue in that mental health app, and being willing to reveal the data about the no fly list to someone (if it feels they're the right someone), that all seems pretty good to me.
hacktivists are just people who try to make the world better through hacking. There's no requirement that they never do anything else for any other reason, or that they only ever hack for a really good cause, or that they never take any pleasure in the recognition they get for their actions or in what they've accomplished.
What's even the point in looking down on someone for doing good things in order to gain a positive reputation? Isn't that something we hope people will do?
Snowden was a compromised asset of Russia, working for them. Most of what he released had nothing to do with his stated purpose. People have all kinds of reasons for doing that sort of thing. Sometimes they really believe in the other country, sometimes it's entirely selfish. We won't know even if he says something on the topic, since we can never know his mind, and he'd demonstrated that he's dishonest.
> Snowden was a compromised asset of Russia, working for them.
So Snowden was a Russian asset, who wanted to go against Russia by leaking information about a US surveillance program, and then after failing being a Russian asset, went back to Russia...??
I'm having a lot of trouble with this line of logic, can you point me to something credible on this?
I can 100% believe there was a selfish purpose, but this doesn't seem like it.
>>go against Russia by leaking information about a US surveillance program
The information Snowden leaked was in no way against Russia, it benefited Russia enormously.
Even the stuff that was on his claimed point created turmoil in the US to this day, which harms the US and only helps Russia
The other stuff he leaked helped Russia directly, and directly endangered and likely got killed US people and/or assets.
and of course he claimed his laptop was secure while he was in Hong Kong on his way to Russia. Anyone who thinks it stayed that way and he was allowed/invited to stay in Russia is a fool.
There is nothing he did that didn't harm the US and benefit Russia, and he was a very successful Russian op. the mere fact that it is still being debated here in the Us shows how successful it was, even if just a provocation/disinformation operation.
In an attempt to sound like he had noble reasons for leaking hundreds of thousands of unrelated secret documents to journalists, Snowden claimed it was watching James Clapper's congressional testimony in March 2013 that triggered him to start downloading and exfiltrating classified material.
This was a lie. He'd actually started collecting his trove of stolen documents many months prior, in mid-2012, coinciding with arguments with his managers. He had a grudge against his employers, and he acted upon it.
Snowden also never mentions that nation-state adversaries got all of this material too. The intelligence agencies of China and Russia must have been rubbing their hands in glee when he fled to them in quick succession. No wonder Russia continues to protect Snowden from being brought to justice in the US, from their point of view he did a stellar espionage job for them.
That's not the only bullshit from Snowden either. Even little things like his claimed $200k salary when it was actually closer to $100k-ish. He's a serial fabricator full of grandiose claims about himself and what he did.
I would like Snowden just as much even if his reason was "I was bored and just felt like fucking some shit up".
I also think this was likely good for the NSA. Their internal opsec and controls seem like they were terrible if they existed at all. Snowden was a wake-up call to do better, and hopefully that makes the US even more secure than it was before.
> Snowden claimed it was watching James Clapper's congressional testimony in March 2013 that triggered him to start downloading and exfiltrating classified material.
This was a lie. He'd actually started collecting his trove of stolen documents many months prior, in mid-2012,
Did he say that the lies to congress were what "triggered to him to start downloading", or was that what finally convinced him to take the truth to the public instead of continuing to bring his concerns to other people within the intelligence community? If I remember correctly, he'd been investigating what looked to him like an unconstitutional program for a while.
> coinciding with arguments with his managers. He had a grudge against his employers,
Nobody gives up their well paying job (while also making sure they'll never work in their field again), risks their life and their life with their loving partner, gives up their freedom, gives up ever seeing their family again, etc all because they get into an argument with their boss.
> Even little things like his claimed $200k salary when it was actually closer to $100k-ish.
That'd be a weird thing to lie about, but he has clarified that issue. According to him the $200,000 was his "career high" salary. He took paycuts at Booz Allen Hamilton in order to get closer to the material he wanted to access. He ended up making $122,000 a year, but that wasn't the most he'd ever made doing intelligence work. Is there some evidence that shows he never made $200,000?
There's no evidence that Snowden brought his supposed 'concerns' to anybody in his chain of command, prior to defecting to Russia. The documents he began stealing in 2012 weren't targeted towards the bulk data collection program - he exfiltrated whatever he could lay his hands on, which of the hundreds of thousands of items were mostly military secrets, and classified information on intelligence work abroad. The claim that this was all driven by watching Clapper testify in committee is a convenient lie, a cover-up for what he was really doing: a massive theft of secrets across the board.
Serial liars do often go back and 'clarify' their lies once called out, it's part of spinning a web of deception. Admitting any wrongdoing, as normal people might do, isn't on the agenda for people like Snowden, all puffed up and full of ego, living off their own bullshit.
Not only did he defect to Russia and enjoy being celebrated there, he also has many people in the US and allies lauding his espionage, filmmakers and journalists gushing over his narrative and airbrushing out inconvenient facts. What a series of accolades for a liar and thief. He seems to revel in this 'wise whistleblower-in-exile' act he's carved out for himself while remaining Putin's pet. This treacherous escapade worked out better than he ever could have imagined.
I think the point here is to expose the nofly list as an unethical and/or illegal government program by leaking it to journalists that can evaluate and summarize it's contents, not to help them secure it better.
White hat hacking assumes that the hacked party is doing normal or ethical business, and that helping them secure it would be generally beneficial.
Also, I'm pretty confident that Maia, as a famous hacker and cybersecurity expert, isn't going to be easily duped by someone impersonating a journalist, and knows how to verify such things.
after your comment, I looked at her main page more closely and found that she mentioned "it/she" in a superscript the middle of a paragraph, so that's what I corrected it to.
I do have to say that, while it's polite to use people's preferences, when just reading an article and posting a quick comment, it's pretty casual, and (almost always) no offense is meant, so none should be taken. Note that the bulk of the comments here are all over the map, and I'm sure no one means to be offensive.
I get the impression that she's/it's doing this from a place of pain and desire to lash out, and "the system" is an easy target for her to fix onto. Not out of any sense of morality.
That's an odd take but I'm getting old. Once you cross 30 its incredibly to spot when someone is an NPC laundering hate in the guise of reading minds. They're clearly young or angry, so you let it go.
The adjective is missing from your comment so I mean not sure whether you meant to write that it's incredibly easy or hard. I certainly do not presume to be a mind-reader, but I do have experience with gender dysphoria. Self-hatred is a hell of a drug.
She appears to have talent in connecting these data sources, but she's also in way over her head when it comes to motivation. On the world chessboard, she's a pawn. I can easily imagine that she's being egged on to do harm to the quasi-neutral but not isolated society that is now her life raft.
Maybe we should or shouldn't, but the potential victims of this aren't just some greedy corporation. Leaking the no fly list could cause irreparable harm to individuals whose names are on it or even similar, causing discrimination by employers and other organizations.
Top secret stazi lists should absolutely be shared. It's why we have 'we have right to know' laws, so the government can't just lock people up in a jail and disappear them.
I think you may not be reading the parent comment correctly. They're saying that those on the list have a right to privacy, therefore outright leaking the list is wrong. Being able to find out whether or not you are on the list is not incompatible with maintaining others' right to privacy.
> those on the list have a right to privacy, therefore outright leaking
Those Americans on list have a right to question their accuser in court before a right (to travel) is restricted. When did we agree to suspend due process, 14th amendment?
I am reading it correctly. They do not have a right to privacy, because we all have the right to know who the government is keeping on lists. Regardless the line of thinking reeks with hypocrisy - the government of the United States has been doing nothing but trampling privacy, yet when it comes to top secret government surveillance state programmes they hold it close to their chests
I don't understand your reasoning. To me, you seem to be saying that since the state violated everyone's privacy, the general public now has the right to violate these individuals' privacy even further to get back at the state.
Publishing the list as-is would also imply that you believe the state is infallible and can't err when putting people on this list. There are thousands of people out there who have redress numbers because they have the same name as someone on the list. Can you imagine if getting a redress number is necessary for employment? Leaking the list would ironically increase the state's control.
(edit: Again, I'm not disagreeing with letting individuals find out if they themselves are on the list, just disagreeing with the method)
What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you understand the repercussions of it being found someone is on a no-fly list (because we all know the US government makes mistakes).
While this is true, it is also true that many people think "where there's smoke, there's fire".
Or, to put it another way, governments can make people disappear by publishing such lists and having the police be busy somewhere else when a mob happens.
And then, what, some hapless person on there gets doxxed and some red neck asshole rolls up on their house and shoots them cause ‘Merica? After 9/11 we had these idiots killing brown people left and right just because “they could be terrorists.”
Don’t be so naive. Lists of people are almost inherently dangerous things. I don’t like that a no-fly list exists in the first place but it would be completely irresponsible to just publish it and wash your hands of it.
If someone was on a no fly list and they wanted the general public to know, they could just put it out there themselves. No? This seems more likely to be used as a form of public shaming than a way to expose injustice.
> If someone was on a no fly list and they wanted the general public to know, they could just put it out there themselves. No?
How would they know? How would they prove it?
There's a known case a few years ago where a woman was trapped away from the US for 3 years - her estranged husband put her on the list when she went to visit her parents, and boom, she's not allowed into the US and no-one will tell her why, making it easy for him to get divorced and keep the house.
(If she'd known what had happened, and been able to put her hands on enough money, she could maybe have flown to Canada/Mexico and entered overland; all she knew was she was denied boarding)
>There's a known case a few years ago where a woman was trapped away from the US for 3 years - her estranged husband put her on the list when she went to visit her parents, and boom, she's not allowed into the US and no-one will tell her why, making it easy for him to get divorced and keep the house.
How does one "put her on the list"? It's not that easy.
Apparently if you happen to be working in the right government department then it is. It was only discovered when he applied for a promotion and they did an extended background check.
You can almost certainly get anyone put on this list by simply creating an email account like firstname.lastname@protonmail.com and sending out a few threatening emails to the right places.
It's not like the federal government sends you a letter to tell you about it and what to do if you have an issue with it. While you raise a valid concern, I think it's a lot more likely to function as the basis of a class action suit - a sufficiently plausible and timely piece of evidence that would move a court to compel proper discovery.
If you are a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, and the TSC determines that you are on the No Fly List, DHS TRIP will send you a letter informing you of your status on the No Fly List and providing the option to submit and receive additional information.
Yes...after you submit a form asking why you were denied boarding, as was stated in the opening paragraph. You don't get notified automatically when you are put on the list.
I have been told a few times that I am on the no fly list, so I avoid planes - that, and I am nearly 7 feet tall.
Is my only way to discover if I am allowed on an airplane is to buy a ticket and get subsequently denied on the boarding gate/security? No FOIA request, or anything similar, to circumnavigate this?
Yes this is insane. I’m a U.S. citizen and if I’m not allowed to fly because of some arbitrary national security measure then that measure had better be public information and known before I book a ticket.
If my government has denied you the right to travel without telling you why I genuinely and sincerely apologize and take responsibility because it should not work like that and ideally I should be able to vote out the people who made that decision.
The Bill of Rights makes no distinction between citizens and non-citizens in its text. It says that rights belong to people, not exclusively to citizens of the several States.
The Equal Protection clause protects citizens and non-citizens alike, e.g. Graham v. Richardson, 403 U.S. 365 (1971)
The first amendment protects aliens once they are admitted to the US, Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945)
There is a right to travel that is an extension of the first amendment rights to freedom of association and freedom of expression.
Are you sure of that? Rights attributed generally to "the people" in the constitution can be limited from being enjoyed based on immigration.
For instance, "the people" have the right to keep and bear arms but god help you if you're here irregularly or on a tourist visa and do not meet one of the exemptions. Sure non-immigrants are persons but federal law doesn't give a fuck.
Granted, this is a Washington State court ruling on the basis of the WA state constitution (which has a stronger RKBA provision than the federal one). But there were similar rulings in other states, and if I remember correctly, at least one of them cited the federal constitution.
As far as the "exemptions" go, it might simply be that nobody ever challenged them before - I mean, as a non-immigrant alien who can get kicked out quite easily in any case, why would you go and antagonize the feds if you can just buy an Alaska hunting license online for $60 and make them happy that the requisite checkbox has a mark in it? But also, until Bruen, the courts tended to defer to various onerous licensing restrictions and requirements even for citizens.
The second amendment is one of the few exceptions rather than the rule. It is difficult to argue for inclusion in "the people" who have the right to bear arms when excluded from selective service and from the definition of the unorganized militia.
By your logic women unaffiliated with service are excluded then. The unorganized militia, by US code, is (you can look up the code but this is pretty close) basically able bodied military age male citizens.
Throwing in all these constraint when the constitution clearly say "the people" without qualification which magically means basically everyone one place but not most everyone somewhere else seems kind of arbitrary to me, but then again the courts seem to have held up visitors aren't people so hey. This is why I'm not a lawyer because really such fuckery makes my brain melt. If I were the sole sitting justice of the supreme court I'd say the qualification is a person is one unit of people and thus they have the rights of the people. IMO if you're one of "the people" then when the constitution uses "the people" unqualified elsewhere that's you -- which by symmetry means if you can't own a gun you're not a person and have none of the other rights of the people.
State law in the state where I live defines the unorganized militia without regard to sex.
At least the 7th circuit agrees with you, (United States v. Meza-Rodriguez) even if there are other federal appeals circuits that don't. So this is something that will likely go to the Supreme Court eventually.
What if you are a US citizen, and it has recently been discovered you have been secretly dealing arms to Russia against current sanctions. And while authorities do not currently know your location they suspect you will be flying to/from Russia very soon?
That's totally different - indictments are usually sealed before arrests in the kind of case you're talking about and there is longstanding precedent for that to prevent flight from prosecution. They would arrest you for ITAR and IEEPA violations before you board. That kind of thing happened long before the no fly list. That is different than an opaque list with a million people on it most of which have never been accused of anything and where there is an expensive appeals process and the government is allowed to use secret evidence.
> The No Fly List is a small subset of the U.S. government Terrorist Screening Database (also known as the terrorist watchlist) that contains the identity information of known or suspected terrorists.
The TSA comment above is pretty straight forward but to be fair the wiki article is filled with instances of speculation.
I had the impression from the article that anyone could submit the form requesting information if they were so inclined; I just meant that most people probably only find out when they're denied. Then again, being 7 feet tall they might be doing you a favor.
Hah, indeed. As a side note, foreign nationals can likely determine their no fly list status from the Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions programs list. I put together an excel workbook of that data (shared link below [0]); it contains OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals list (SDN), and non-SDN sanctions consolidated set. OFAC sanctions lists can be directly searched [1] and accessed via ftp [2]. In the excel workbook I shared below it's interesting to web search the entities listed as "CYBER" (see the sdn_cyber tab).
What are you talking about? The list is literally designed to harm those people. It's a no-fly-list. If anything, having it public could provide public pressure to get them off the list.
It also provides proof to the victims that they were on it. It may not bring justice from the same government that put them there in the first place, but spreading their stories may (hopefully) reduce its legitimacy and revoke the consent of the governed.
Though I don’t like the idea of it, I’m also not certain that I know better than people whose careers are in national defence. I’m not convinced that it’s a black and white thing. There are bad actors out there, and sometimes it’s clearly advantageous to hide information from them, which means hiding it from everyone.
Maybe there are reasons this is short sighted or I’m missing a greater point. I’d be interested to hear ideas in any case.
Breaking into private S3 buckets because you are bored is not considered an appropriate “Step 1” by the _professional community_ (people who get paid to do this for a living) at large.
Among people who plan to be financially rewarded for their work and also not be in handcuffs, Step 1 is usually to “Get written permission”.
Perhaps this is just my autism speaking, but am I the only one who gets completely freaked out by sentences like the above? "It" refers to inanimate objects, things which can't have free will, do crimes, or be prosecuted.
It's almost like you're talking about how a lawnmower decided to run a child over and then incriminate itself by boasting about it on social media. It makes no sense!
I know she picked that pronoun herself, but I really wish she didn't. It just makes communication difficult.
Competing access needs: autists need regularity, ??s ("the category of people who go by it/its") need ... creativity? chaos? uniqueness? Those goals are at direct odds.
(I'm going to presume here that crimew doesn't actually want to be considered an object, because we don't generally respect objects' pronoun choices. So calling them an "it" in the grammatical way would be paradoxically self-defeating; we call objects he/she all the time and they usually don't complain.)
This is also why I will always defend the use of "they" as valid. There has to be at least one universal pronoun.
Yes, it's likely that I am more challenged by the grammatically incorrect pronouns than most neurotypicals in this thread, thanks for pointing that out.
A lot of people who like to cry 'transphobic!' may wish to understand that there are people who need accommodation in our society other than trans people, and that heralding chosen pronouns as truly inviolable will sometimes make other people less comfortable.
That said, I have so far managed to avoid any such accusations in this thread, thankfully.
I fail to see how any of the mentioned pronouns are ungrammatical.
As for competing needs and such, in this case it’s as easy as using she/her (as maia lists that as one of its pronouns), in other cases it’s usually acceptable to use they/them or no pronouns at all. The only thing that is generally absolutely unacceptable is (knowingly) using the wrong gendered pronouns or using gendered pronouns when the person only uses non-gendered pronouns.
It's not that it's hard in any absolute sense, it's that imposes an ongoing overhead cost on people who may already pay a high cost to interact at all. (Also, of course, a cost on reading discussion about it. (Does that 'it' refer to the discussion or the author? You don't know! Have fun investing effort to work it out, every single time it's used.)
I wonder what the motivation was. Anarchism is mentioned elsewhere, so if I wonder if that’s a motivating factor here. At any rate, I appreciate that people are trying their best to be respectful. Personally, I’d also prefer to use “she” if that’s alright with her (it?). This becomes confusing quickly when we’re also trying to use it abstractly to refer to arguments and concepts.
I totally understand wanting to be respectful, but respect goes both ways. She needs to respect the fact that her odd pronouns are literally breaking the English language for people who want to use them.
I personally think that the ultimate end game for pronouns in English will be creations of new ones with no connotations (so easy to apply like names) that get incorporated into the language or more likely an eventual move to a single pronoun that applies to everyone. Chinese, for example, only differentiates in written form so would be an easy adjustment. They is every high schoolers preferred choice in essays before English teachers complain.
I'm not sure how the under 20 is adjusting but in my groups of mid 20 to late 30 nobody is trying to disrespect anyone by not using preferred pronouns, but it just slips out from decades of usage, and people just end up replacing pronouns with the person's actual name after multiple times apologizing. The having to remember multiple names when meeting someone just doesn't seem tenable long term.
> more likely an eventual move to a single pronoun that applies to everyone
Oh god i hope. As a german, we have pronouns for all nouns. So far no societal backlash against those, but they just seem totally useless to me (beside maybe a teeny tiny bit of "forward error correction"). You just have to learn them. Surest way to spot an immigrant. Then there is job titles. In the US, "nurse" seems to be used for both genders, but the words origin is female. Yeah, we have that as well for many jobs. Others usually have suffixes. Ofc we want to be welcoming to all. You can imagine the job listings...
You can't 'break' a language. You either just follow its rules or flaunt them. If your output is still comprehensible - which 'it' as a pronoun is - it's still language. Back in the day English used to have two pronouns for 'you'. Was merging them both into one pronoun also literally breaking the language?
She's actively making the language less comprehensible by breaking the rules. Multiple times in this thread, people have said "it" and I've been confused as to what - or who - they're referring to.
I'm not a language historian, so I don't have an opinion on your last question.
Really not. Most sentences can be easily rewritten without pronouns. I know a bunch of trans people and have trouble remembering who likes to be called what, so I just reduced the number of direct references. It's not that hard to do, because most conversations don't involve so many subjects that it becomes complex.
People seem to be assuming that this request for certain pronoun usage is made in good faith. Asking to be called "it" is probably just trolling on "its" part. "It" would probably laugh at the people bending over backwards to accommodate.
Have you considered that someone who chooses "it/its" as its pronouns is intentionally trying to break the English language with said choice? In this case, it is Swiss, and therefore it is likely not a native English speaker which could be a factor as well.
The singular only version of "they" is "they", just like the singular only version of "you" is "you". "You" was formerly plural, with "thou" as singular, but "thou" has since fallen into disuse.
> "You" was formerly plural, with "thou" as singular, but "thou" has since fallen into disuse.
Sadly. Overloading "you" and "they" feels rather clunky. I wish it got rid of "he" and "she" instead - gendering pronouns is completely useless, and that's coming from someone whose native tongue genders much more than just pronouns...
You was always both singular and plural, but in the singular form it was the formal second person pronoun, whereas thou was the second person singular informal pronoun; it's the same as the difference between du/Sie in German, tu/vous in French, or je/u in Dutch. This is why the King James bible uses thou: it's intended to feel more accessible to its readers with a friendly tone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You says the singular "you" didn't occur until Modern English, and the singular form 'ye' died out in the 1600s with early Modern English.
The King James Bible, published 1611, uses "ye" as the singular form of the formal "you", as in "Ye shall know them by their fruits."
] In a period of rapid linguistic change the translators avoided contemporary idioms, tending instead towards forms that were already slightly archaic, like verily and it came to pass.[87] The pronouns thou/thee and ye/you are consistently used as singular and plural respectively, even though by this time you was often found as the singular in general English usage, especially when addressing a social superior (as is evidenced, for example, in Shakespeare). ...
] Another sign of linguistic conservatism is the invariable use of -eth for the third person singular present form of the verb, as at Matthew 2:13: "the Angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dreame".
I've been trying to figure this out and just end up being more confused.
One issue is that song's use of "ye" seems to be from the 1750s, so about 150 years after the KJV usage, which in turn was somewhat archaic. English changes.
> In Early Modern English, ye functioned as both an informal plural and formal singular second-person nominative pronoun. "Ye" is still commonly used as an informal plural in Hiberno‐English and Newfoundland English
So it's possible that the KJV uses "ye" only for formal singular second-person, even if was also used more widely used for informal plural, and as that informal plural became more widely used, it became the go-to way to translate the Latin, which is in plural.
Sure, but that’s not what the page says. The Wikipedia article says that. The page says “it/she”. From what I’m familiar with, the order is usually “singular/plural” and when multiple are preferred I’m used to seeing it written as you notated it here as pairs in a list e.g. she/her, him/his, they/them, it/its, xe/xim, etc, in a list. I guess I can infer that’s the intention, however, which is fair enough.
But that really didn’t have much to do with what I was discussing. That was a separate argument about how we use “it” to refer to objects as a rule. Humans are objects, but we also generally prefer to think of them as objects of a higher order variety. In conversation, we take advantage of this to parse and interpret context more quickly. Choosing to do otherwise makes it more difficult to know if the “it” I just used in this sentence is Maia, some other object, or an abstract point I’m making in this discussion. Anyway, that’s why I prefer she/her.
> Perhaps this is just my autism speaking, but am I the only one who gets completely freaked out by sentences like the above?
Hi, fellow autist here.
Yes, it feels like my brain hits some speedbumps with that particular pronoun. I wouldn't say I get "freaked out" though; it's just unfamiliar yet.
Despite what other comments claim, I doubt this is agrammatical. "It" is part of the same grammatical class (the class of pronouns!!) and so fits anywhere "he" or "she" does.
> "It" refers to inanimate objects, things which can't have free will
Could you bring yourself to see the choice of "it/its" pronouns exactly as a self-identification with things that feel no agency of their own? I don't know why Maia claims those pronouns, but I'd get this motivation for sure.
This is the result of most of progressive society saying that it is socially acceptable for a person's preference of expression to mean more than grammar and clearness of communication.
It may do so in English, but it is Swiss, so probably also speaks German, where 'it' - 'es' is Genus Neutrum, exactly meaning neutral gender. For example 'the child' - 'das Kind' is neutrally gendered. Hope this makes sense.
In English, animals are routinely referred to as "it", and they're obviously animate.
So, at most it could be said that "it" doesn't normally refer to persons... but even that's not true if you include sci-fi in your definition of "English language". When dealing with topics such as non-standard biological sex and/or gender fluidity, older sci-fi works would often use "it" for such people without any implication of non-personhood.
I find it particularly amusing that you used the wrong pronoun while scolding me to use the correct pronouns for her.
If that doesn't prove the impracticality of using "it" as a pronoun, I don't know what does.
It breaks the rules of English that we all understand subconsciously, so it's difficult to do without consciously thinking about every single usage of a pronoun in a sentence, which is not how most people type.
I use the word "they" in that context all the time regardless of gender or pronoun. I actually thought about that before using it. It's a common use of the word "they" in casual English.
