Am I the only one who thinks this is spoon feeding the script kiddies to cause mayhem?
It almost makes me angry that websites like Facebook and Twitter don't force all traffic over https. They've got the money and the expertise. They just don't care if your account gets sniffed and taken over at a web cafe.
The most un-ethical thing I have done was to take one of the OLPC XO laptops and convert it into a MITM machine, rebroadcasting the SSID it connects to while routing and logging all traffic anyone who connects to it generates. It took a weekend to setup using pre-existing tools and scripts and can be deployed anywhere I want within 2 minutes and run for up to 6 hours hidden in the bottom of my backpack. It was a fun experiment, and surely made me more aware of just how vulnerable I was outside of my home network.
Another point of interest, this weekend I hacked on a Minecraft bot for the Alpha version. In order to understand and dissect the connection protocol I needed to recreate, I used wireshark to dump and parse how the client authenticates and connects to the server. Even that transmits your username and password in plaintext.
How else are we going to convince people to secure their sites and protect their users? People have been presenting on this issue for years (Ferret & Hamster, Blackhat 2007) and companies haven't responded/cared. It's possible to solve this problem (Gmail is all HTTPS, and done correctly, Amazon has a tiered authentication system that properly uses SSL for important things, Wordpress does SSL right for accessing their admin interface) - companies need to step up and address the issue.
I'm not saying this isn't the site's fault. They definitely need a wake-up call.