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Yep, this bothers me too. attr_accesible is to Rail's what magic_quotes_gpc was to PHP: a terribly misconceived 'helper' feature that is almost designed to trip up beginners in the worst way.

Of course, that GitHub should get caught by it is alarming.

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Even with good knowledge of a system people forget things. The blame for this incident falls 100% on rails and its awful design. It's like blaming the driver for crashing your car whose brakes can silently and unpredictably fail unless you press some button when you first get into the car. Critical failure points should be isolated aggressively. Many software "engineers" have not yet grasped this.

I haven't heard a single kind thing about GitHub's code from people who've deployed their FI, or more recently, enterprise product.

They've got some talented people, but I'm guessing from their posts speaking of how they work that they don't have much in the way of code review.

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