Fatal Error on vanilla site with just Persona and Session API

I attempted to test this module on a vanilla site this morning. The site was on a fresh database with just Session API (w/ patch) and Persona installed.

As admin, I could log out. However, as anonymous, every page results in the following:

Recoverable fatal error: Argument 1 passed to persona_block_view_alter() must be an array, null given, called in /var/www/ptstest1a/drupal/includes/module.inc on line 1063 and defined in persona_block_view_alter() (line 510 of /var/www/ptstest1a/drupal/sites/all/modules/persona/persona.module).

To debug, I altered persona_block_view_alter() to match the following:

/**
 * Implements hook_block_view_alter().
 */
function persona_block_view_alter($data, $block) {
  if (!$data) {
    drupal_set_message('$block is ' . var_export($block, TRUE));
    return;
  }
  if (variable_get('persona_takeover') && $block->module == 'user' && $block->delta == 'login') {
    $data['content'] = array();
  }
}

This turned up the following two blocks getting passed to the hook_block_alter() with a null $data occasionally:

    $block is stdClass::__set_state(array( 'bid' => '2', 'module' => 'search', 'delta' => 'form', 'theme' => 'bartik', 'status' => '1', 'weight' => '-1', 'region' => 'sidebar_first', 'custom' => '0', 'visibility' => '0', 'pages' => '', 'title' => '', 'cache' => '-1', ))
    $block is stdClass::__set_state(array( 'bid' => '4', 'module' => 'user', 'delta' => 'login', 'theme' => 'bartik', 'status' => '1', 'weight' => '0', 'region' => 'sidebar_first', 'custom' => '0', 'visibility' => '0', 'pages' => '', 'title' => '', 'cache' => '-1', ))

Theoretically, $data shouldn't ever be null here... but it is in core. The attached patch makes the module handle this situation for now. I'll file a core issue and reference it here as well.