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Holey Hotmail | page 1, 2
A lot of Hotmail users are going to be very mad about this debacle, and it's not going to make them feel better to tell them that "you get what you pay for." (Hotmail was the pioneer of free Web-based e-mail, which quickly became a standard feature of many online services and portals.) As ZDNet's Jesse Berst points out, many people use services like Hotmail for personal, sensitive or confidential e-mail that they don't want to route through their employer -- so their Hotmail in boxes are the last ones they want to see broken into. It's easy to trot out the old truisms about security: that there's no such thing as a totally secure computer system on a network; that every system has its weaknesses; that a free system serving millions of people on the Net is bound to have some vulnerabilities. That's all undeniable -- but it won't make you feel better the next time you learn that some clown deleted your e-mail. One lesson underscored here is that the Net magnifies any security breach to gargantuan proportions. Got a master password, a back door or a hole in your code? Sooner or later someone will get his hands on it and publish it to the world. (One server hosting the Hotmail entrance was in Sweden; another, apparently, was in Uzbekistan.) That's the bad news about word traveling fast; the good news is, you're bound to hear about any trouble yourself, soon enough. Scott Rosenberg's column appears once a week in Technology There are lots of advantages to this model, to be sure; you don't have to worry about synchronizing data between home and workplace, for instance. But there's one huge disadvantage that the Hotmail saga neatly illuminates: Once your data is on someone else's machine, its privacy and safety is utterly in the hands of that someone. One of the sites that published the Hotmail entrance code later replaced it with a brief message that concluded, "btw, do you trust microsoft?" Maybe you do trust that Microsoft isn't interested in reading your e-mail (a good bet); you still might not trust it to keep your e-mail safe from prying eyes, given this week's events. If we're lucky, enough people will get mad enough about what happened at Hotmail to force more companies like Microsoft to treat security as a priority, not an afterthought. If we're really lucky, there'll be a public groundswell for privacy strong enough to derail schemes like the dangerous plan currently under discussion in Washington to give the government the right to break into home computers. More likely, though, we will continue to barrel down the road to Free Web-Based Everything -- and to be rudely awakened by more headlines about security holes.
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