Maybe a gittip feature (I don't know if it already does this) is an option to make all donations anonymous so that the recipient does not know the source. This should remove the conflict of interest then.
As whit537 mentions in a sibling comment, all Gittip donations are already anonymous, but blog posts like John's here end up removing the anonymity for particular donations.
Google is the industry's most active and effective corporate advocate for TLS. They're one of the key drivers for certificate pinning and one of the earliest mainstream deployers of forward secrecy. So I think that argument is a little bogus.
I don't understand the first point, though. Could you clarify?
QUIC is a very new, experimental protocol that runs on UDP.
Their (relevant) basis is that TCP's algorithms are completely controlled by the OSes and the routers and all. Using UDP, QUIC can quickly deploy new algorithms without requiring a major part of the world's infrastructure changed.
Google is the industry's most active and effective corporate advocate for TLS simply because it makes tracking users and selling targeted advertising a whole lot easier. Their involvement in the whole PRISM affair has undoubtedly demonstrated that privacy is none of their concern.
Years ago, in days of old, when magic filled the air, I wrote a Slashdot troll post generator. It eventually produced some pretty hilarious posts, but I never closed the loop by allowing it to post. It would make a fun project for learning a new language; perhaps I'll install Dart and give it a shot.
The option has been in firefox as far back as I can remember. It's in the Preferences, under Privacy; you'll need to select "Use custom settings for history". I've never noticed any breakage, and I assume in-part because iOS and Safari set it as their default a few years back.
The flip side of this is someone with an influential blog (high PageRank) etc. can easily use this to smear someone and there's absolutely nothing the target can do about it.
For example, look at Thomas Hawk (aka Andrew Peterson).
In the past, his (occasionally mis-guided) vitriol has been aimed at various targets. It's tapered down since he was sued but it remains appalling how someone with so much pent up anger is able to adversely affect others.
"Shortly afterward Peterson / Hawk caved in, reached an out of court agreement with the museum, removed the allegations of fraud from his blog, and replaced the offending Flickr set with an abject apology so humiliating it’s practically a Private Eye parody."
