[gechr]

With regards to (1), being a file-dump place: it's worth noting that GitHub currently imposes soft (50MB) and hard (100MB) size limits per single file[1]. If you try to push a file that exceeds either of these limits from the command line, you'll receive a response from the remote server pointing you in the direction of their Large File Storage (LFS) service[2], which they charge for beyond the free 1GB storage/bandwidth per month.

Out of curiosity, I just tried uploading a file larger than 100MB to test the limits via the browser and received the following error:

  Yowza, that’s a big file. Try again with a file smaller than 25MB.

For me, this significantly limits its feasibility as an alternative to Dropbox.

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/conditions-for-large-files/

[2] https://help.github.com/articles/billing-plans-for-git-large...

[NKCSS]

This is probably as a DoS protection; accepting large responses have always been a vector. They could work around this by having some additional logic fire beforehand to prevent it becoming an attack vector.