[OTR-users] Discussion of the use of "his" as a gender-neutral pronoun in an unlikely place

[Ian Goldberg]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 07:30:28PM +0100, Paul Wouters wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Dec 2005, Kat Hanna wrote:
> 
> > It's not okay, as pretty much everyone has suggested, to substitute a
> > passive construction: the very point of the alert is that your buddy has
> > closed her/his end of the connection, *but yours is still open*.
> 
> semi-off topic.
> If it is that important that we close our end as well, since our remote
> buddy closed his/her end, why don't we just close it instead of asking
> the (local) user to close it?
> 
> Then we could just write: OTR session with $buddy closed.

That's a security problem.  Suppose you were typing a long (private)
message to your buddy, and she closes her end of the private connection
just before you hit "Enter".  You absolutely do *not* want your message
to go out in the clear.  So what we do instead is this: when your buddy
closes her end of the connection, all outgoing messages to her are
*blocked* until you select whether to restart the private conversation,
or end it.

   - Ian