Ars Technica got hacked, sends emails to registrants

[LizKat]

Got an email this afternoon suggesting a password change.

What bothers me about these things is so many outfits want an email address to reggie with, so they can later contact you (or ban you or confirm you just won a trip to the Bahamas or whatever!). So then when a site is hacked, even if you change your password, you know that email address is out there getting sold again and again, completely outside the more usual (almost wrote "normal", and why not at this point?!) ways that addresses get harvested for spamming purposes, e.g., bots on relay servers etc.

 

[maflynn]

Many sites now use FB as a way to register, do you think that's better?

The email address to register makes sense since they send a confirmation email.

 

[rhett7660]

This is one reason I have an email that is just for signing up to sites. If they get hacked the email address has no personal information about me in it. Now stuff like Amazon and Apple, or places that might have credit card information attached to it, I don't use at other sites.

 

[turtle777]

Better yet: I have my own domain.

Each website gets a unique email address: URL@mydomain.com

If the email address gets compromised, I will send it to dev/null, and create a new one.

-t

 

[smallcoffee]

Many sites now use FB as a way to register, do you think that's better?

The email address to register makes sense since they send a confirmation email.

Oh oh I think this is the worst. As far as collecting data about customers and all that garbage, signing in to something (or even having a Facebook account really) is about the worst thing you could do.