The security practices are appalling, and their lack of clarity on the counter-party issue is damning. If I were Kevin---or, indeed, any customer of that exchange---I'd take my money and go elsewhere.

Still, it's pretty astounding how myopic the rest of the Mt Gox forum users appear. They're taking a situation that's beyond a doubt the fault of the Mt Gox admins and getting ready to lynch a dude who seems to have acted rather reasonably (intentionally not exploiting a known loophole to exceed the withdrawl limit, reporting his disposition immediately to the site's maintainer, et cetera).

- If someone prefers to search Google without personalization, add "&pws=0" (the "pws" stands for "personalized web search") to the end of the Google search url to turn it off, or use the incognito version of Chrome. Personalization tends to be a nice relevance improvement overall, but it doesn't trigger that much--when it launched, the impact was on the order of one search result above the fold for one in five search results.

- personalization has much less impact than localization, which takes things like your IP address into account when determining the best search results. You can change localization by going to country-specific versions of Google (e.g. search for [bank] on google.co.uk vs. google.co.nz), or on google.com you can click "change location" on the left sidebar to enter a different city or zip code in the U.S.

- We do have algorithms in place designed specifically to promote variety in the results page. For example, you can imagine limiting the number of results returned from one single site to allow other results to show up instead. That helps with the diversity of the search results. When trying to find the best search results, we look at relevance, diversity, personalization, localization, as well as serendipity and try to find the best balance we can.

I saw Eli Pariser's talk at TED and was skeptical, although I did enjoy his example of Facebook starting to return only his liberal friends because he only ever clicked on the links his liberal friends shared. I had a number of concerns browsing through Pariser's book, but I would encourage anyone interested in these issues to pick up a copy; it's a thoughtful read.

This is the OP's complaint: once you're over 20 private repositories, you're paying $100/month. He wants stupid-simple, hosted, private git repositories, and lots of them. He probably ran a bunch of numbers on servers, storage, and bandwidth, and found that he run a simple, low-cost hosted git solution (without all the fancy web features) at a fraction the cost.

There was an opportunity in the market to make a simple, low-cost competitor to github, and he built it. Kudos.