As documented on:
http://community.livejournal.com/lj_dev/693080.html and the corresponding lj request
http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=536849 , there's a bug in the way the digest authentication works on livejournal, which occurs when trying to load syndicated pages with authentication.
The fix seems to be quite simple, as far as I understand it, but the request is currently closed.
Given it's been about 3 and a half years, how can a user (such as myself) work around this problem, and/or see the status of this bug fix request is?