[jrockway]

I agree; you can easily have an authenticating proxy. Like I said, I'm guessing that they decided it was a static page on a public CDN first, so now it's hard to add an authenticating proxy on each CDN node. If they wanted auth from the start, then it wouldn't be a static page sitting on a CDN node, and it would be easy to add. (But harder to scale to a CDN, and thus we'd see a lot of Github Pages sites slashdotted or whatever.)

I could easily be completely wrong about this. But it's interesting, to me, to consider the order that features were requested, and how that affects future feature requests. Sometimes you paint yourself in a corner and make easy things hard. Something to think about as you plan your own software!