This has been a big deal around the net as well as HN recently. Your sarcasm is both inappropriate as well as indicative of ignorance. Parent should be upvoted despite the superfluous comment of "didn't have time to read the source", because at first, I didn't perceive why this was useful.
Yeah, ignorance. I read the Jakob Nielsen article and all the responses, don't worry. At least with his proposal, you got a checkbox to enable the feature, and you knew explicitly without having to understand how hashes work that you were giving away your password if you typed it in view of other people.