Granted, this probably won't work so well for the web client, because of that funky cert auth dialog box, and the general knowledge base...
Just a lil bit-o paranoia.
By the by, how's the backup situation for the livejournal servers and their configurations? I don't recall hearing much about this.
Lil' more paranoia :)
BTW, what are the possibilities of localized LJ image mirrors? Have the server point to images hosted closest to where the user says they are, and have some volunteers with too much bandwidth shove up a crappy thttpd server mirroring the images, or somesuchsomething.