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Wow after both of those blog posts, TWO years ago, I'm surprised github hasn't stopped exposing this identity information and us HN users haven't started being more paranoid about our ssh_configs.

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Public keys are meant to be public, so is it a problem if everyone knows your public key? How often do you want to SSH into a remote server while wanting to remain private? And supposing you really want to, can't you maintain separate keys for separate hosts as other commenters have suggested?

Perhaps I'm missing something here.

why would they? after all they are public keys, they are supposed to be public. if you really are afraid of github exposing your public key, I think you can always create a separate pair to use only with github.

And in some sense github is doing as a favour, by partially solving the key distribution problem.

If you send me your public key via email, I don't know whether you are who you claim you are. If I get your public key via github, at least I know that you are the person contributing to all those open source projects.

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