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Comment by microarchitect | Hacker News Reader

We have begun notifying our subscribers and advising them to change their Sosasta passwords as soon as possible. We will keep our Indian subscribers fully informed as we learn more.

This is a lie. Neither I nor my brother have heard from them. Keep in mind that this happened on Friday and it's already Tuesday here. In the meantime, I have been spammed about deals that I don't care about through e-mail and text messages four times.

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I suppose we also have no verification that the passwords are no longer stored in plain text either, so changing it seems to be postponing the inevitable -- it is now a target for getting hacked again, with a delicious plain text payload as the reward for anyone doing it.

If my doctor was leaking my medical records left and right to advertisers around town, I would sue him... at some point leaking my online identity has to have some sort of repercussions behind it besides me getting online and being openly angry on the internet.

Yep, that'll do it ;)

ADDENDUM. Speak of the devil (another HN story): http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2011/06/cloud-site-dro...

> If my doctor was leaking my medical records left and right to advertisers around town, I would sue him... at some point leaking my online identity has to have some sort of repercussions behind it besides me getting online and being openly angry on the internet.

What would you do ? sue them? The EULA you have accepted usually forbids it, or limits the amount of damages you can claim to a few bucks. I am not a lawyer, but i doubt such an EULA would be declared void in court.

Somehow, I think this wouldn't be the case. Otherwise, doctors would be throwing EULA agreements left and right, and saving millions on malpractice insurance fees.

They do. They are called waivers. You sign them all the time when using the health care system.

I've never seen a complete waiver of rights. What you typically sign is an agreement to try arbitration before (or instead of) suing in the courts. I don't believe it is possible to waive the ability to be penalized for negligence, just the venue the penalty is assessed in.

Of course, said arbiter is much less likely to give out a seven digit award than a jury is.

Wrote a quick command line Gmail password changer for this type of thing; if I see my username I can go ahead and start changing passwords. Hopefully I'll pound more out this weekend. http://christopherwoodall.com/gmail.py

Though I am not a subscriber, I have received information from some of my friends that they are getting these warning emails.

How is that spam? You opted-in to receive the e-mails.

Not if those emails are from spammers harvesting the Groupon DB that is now available on Google.

He said he was spammed about deals.

Most spam offers deals.

He's counting deals he doesn't care about as spam.

Unless telepathy is invented all subscription email can be spam then.

Groupon takes security and privacy very seriously.

Just not seriously enough to encrypt passwords.

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