I'm not sure what your point is, since every "serious" Rails app does need it, and even unserious web apps with "incidental" auth features can end up storing bank passwords.
i beg to differ. here are "serious" websites that doesn't do user authentication:
- google.com (the original search engine)
- techmeme.com
- wikipedia (the original version)
- tinyurl
I could probably find dozens of examples, but those are just the ones I could find on my toolbar. And yes, those are not specifically rails application, but they do prove that there are web applications without user authentication
Ok, I'm not sure you've noticed the past few years of Intertubing, but Google has the second most coveted authentication token on the net. I'm not sure what a techmeme.com is, but I definitely know that Wikipedia has logins, and admin logins, and like 3 levels of authentication above that.
