According to GitHub, the reason for this change is to increase security. Instead of passwords, they offer the use of personal access tokens (PATs) when using the REST API or accessing git ...

Learn how to unlock GPT-5 in VS Code using GitHub Copilot Pro. Here are the steps and how to bypass usage limits using your API key.

Rather than hosting a web server where someone can drop a binary, it looks at GitHub releases. [Justin] had to include a streaming JSON parser, as GitHub API responses tend to be beefy.

NCSU academics scanned GitHub accounts for a period of nearly six months, between October 31, 2017, and April 20, 2018, and looked for text strings formatted like API tokens and cryptographic keys.