Stephan Paukner :: syslog

From: me
To: info@[a technical job board].com
Subject: Re: Please delete my account

[a technical job board] wrote:

Your account has been deleted. Please inform us about the reason you want to close your account.
We would like to improve our services and the website all the time so I hope you can give me some valuable feedback.

Reason for deletion: I was shocked to see that after registration, I was sent my password in an email in clear text.
There are two things wrong with that:
1. You obviously store users’ passwords in clear text.
2. You send passwords via email, an inherently insecure protocol.
While your service might be intended for technically versed professionals, these facts state that your service isn’t run by such.

In short, and for non-computer-geeks: SSL certificates are used for data encryption, to securely transmit private data over the internet. You probably know web URLs starting with “https” instead of “http”. OK, now, those secure web sites may run on a machine that use the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. Unfortunately, Debian had a problem with generating such SSL certificates. They were recently uncovered to not secure your private data anymore. Luckily, a fix came out quickly, but there are still many websites using the broken certificates.

You want to be alarmed whenever you stumble over a website that still uses one of those bad SSL certificates! You want the SSL Blacklist add-on for your Firefox web browser!