I had enabled PASSWORD PROTECTION on a site I was testing and went back and forth a bit with support on why my cron jobs wasn't working. After a few days finally found out that password protection will break cron jobs since they can loop back to the site. While that's understandable it should be a warning, it also makes it nearly impossible to test development of plugins without use of a cron, so a work around or solution for this would be good since it's advertised as "This can be especially useful during site development."