You guys have a better product? Let's see it. Until then, stop acting like children.

That doesn't make the point any less valid. I don't need to have built a car to realise that a designer who creates a car with no brakes is incompetent.

You're missing the point. The issue is not that the project has problems - the issue is that the Diaspora devs are making elementary mistakes that should never have been made. The problems that have been pointed out essentially mean that they're clueless about how to write secure code, and as such anything they write / are responsible for is automatically suspect.

In order for Diaspora to be at all credible, the devs need to learn a hell of a lot about security first, or someone else needs to take over the project - the kind of mistakes they're making here are elementary, and shows that not only do they have almost no knowledge of how to make a web application secure, they also aren't thinking through the logical consequences of what they're writing.

Diaspora isn't doomed because it has flaws, it's doomed because the developers have proven themselves to be fundamentally incompetent.

Hmm, let me see... How about support for OpenVPN networks? There's not exactly a whole lot of other things that OpenVPN is useful for!

...the program is to be added to the daily Cron jobs to be executed so that each day it will report to Canonical over HTTP the number of times this system previously sent to Canonical...

That's not a very good method of tracking usage - not everybody leaves their PC on 24/7, so the cronjob may not always run - and using the number of cronjob runs as a counter for how long the system has been active isn't a great idea either. Storing the install date and sending that would be a better indication.