I'd be lying if I didn't believe that they would do something this stupid. They recently put the site behind a pay wall and I can no longer catch up on hometown news as a result. Who ever running that business is an idiot.
"Wait Walter, what? I don't understand this email."
"Turns out our $8/hr rent-a-coder destroyed the user table. All that is left are the passwords, which for some reason are in a different table in plain-text."
"Crap. Wait, what are you holding?"
"Its the hard drive from the server. I'm going to send it to one of those recovery places. The guy on the phone said that they could do a recovery for 10k."
"What?! I'm not paying that much. Wait, doesn't the server need that drive?"
"Dunno. It seems to still be working. Lots of lights flashed when I took it out, but I ignored it."
"Fine, then what do we do. We can't tell people to log in with their passwords, can we?"
"Why not? Its not like we'll be mocked by some roving gang of geeks. The passwords are still associated with their member IDs. We can just put in some bullshit about security and switching the username and password. We'll ignore what they type in as username!"
loudly and in unison
"Winning!"
I actually just signed my grandmother up to their service here and all it is, is a paid subscription to pdf copies of their newspaper as they release it. Theres not exactly much to protect there and worst case scenario is that someone gets some free copies of the paper. I don't think its such a big deal for them to be a little lax with password security given what you get behind the security wall. (as long as people aren't using that same password everywhere ... which may be the real problem here)
Most people do reuse passwords. That's the reason this is significant. It wouldn't be newsworthy if a service like this screwed up and made getting free copies of the hometown newspaper easy.
The Caledonian Record does many things that don't really make sense - I'm not completely surprised.
Maybe it's time for a VT HN meetup :)
P.S. Any Ruby folks in Southern VT (or S/W NH or N/W MA)? We'd love to hear from you! :) http://greenriver.org/people/jobs
I lived in Bethlehem and Franconia for many years, before moving to Vermont for a while (still along 302, though-- but I've been in Norway for the past 13 years or so. Never expected to see the Caledonian Record on HN.
Hey: say hello to Roland for me, will you?