Editing Minecraft Beta pre-1.8's lack of authentication (section)

==Background==
In version Beta 1.8, Mojang has changed the endpoint that's used for authentication on Minecraft servers from "www.minecraft.net" to "session.minecraft.net". Unknown amount of time later the original endpoint used for the authentication was shut down, breaking authentication support for several old Minecraft versions, despite no actual changes in the behaviour of the endpoint. The latter endpoint still works, despite being insecure (supports HTTP requests, with token being within the URL parameters) - this means that the shutdown is likely not a security concern.

Lack of authentication has caused several Minecraft servers to:

*lose part of the playerbase due to a need of modding the game client (and server) to fix the authentication issue,
*become completely insecure by allowing non-premium Minecraft users to join (e.g. opens the risk of botting the server, or brute-forcing user login passwords),
*break the EULA of the game due to allowing non-premium Minecraft users to join their server.