Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaolinite | Hacker News Reader

Just rang my bank to cancel my debit card. Hate doing that. Now I have a week or two of failing payments, bills, etc to look forward to.

I will probably be moving away from Linode after this. The poor response to this and lack of full disclosure, plus reading that they're using ColdFusion (wtf?), means I don't feel I'll be able to trust them any longer. It's a shame because their UI and service is generally fantastic.

View on HN

There's nothing wrong with ColdFusion, especially if you've had it around for a while. It's not as glitzy as Rails, but it works and it's still supported and modern. Besides, this isn't ColdFusion's fault. Leave because Linode violated your trust, but not because of the programming language they wrote their site in.

It's closed-source, made by Adobe and seems to have a bad security record - there are 3 things wrong with it.

Besides, it's not the reason I'm leaving - it just makes me question them. I'm not after glitzy. If anything, I'd have expected Linode to have been written in Perl or something.

(made by Adobe) ⇒ (closed-source) ∧ (has a bad security record)

The problem more lies with Linode not properly dealing with a disclosed ColdFusion vulnerability: http://breenmachine.blogspot.com/2013/03/cool-coldfusion-pos...

It may not have been disclosed yet when it was exploited.

That seems unnecessarily pre-emptive, especially since you are protected as a card user and don't know your card was compromised.

Not with a debit card - you don't get the same protections as a credit card and I'd rather just have a few days of hassle and then know my card is secure than be unsure and have to constantly check my account for odd transactions. Also, whilst I may get money refunded if taken from my account, if I miss bill payments as a result - that would affect my credit report and I don't know if that would be removed when I report the transactions as fraudulent.

Yes, you do.

The Debit Card was used in a Credit transaction, so Visa's general protections still apply. You can dispute any of the transactions if they were done through credit (which online ones are nearly 100% of the time).

Ok, good to know. Even so - I could very easily miss £50-100 or so of fraudulent transactions each month so I'd rather just get a new card.

Had $3-4k stripped off a debit Visa while in Europe on holiday. Sent a list of fraudulent transactions to my bank and they had them sorted and refunded within an hour.

I'll be watching my card more closely after this Linode incident, but not cancelling it preemptively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com