This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
by Richard Chirgwin (The Register)
German chat platform Knuddels.de (“Cuddles”) has been fined €20,000 for storing user passwords in plain text (no hash at all? Come on, people, it’s 2018).
The data of Knuddels users was copied and published by malefactors in July. In September, someone emailed the company warning them that user data had been published at Pastebin (only
8,000 members affected) and Mega.nz (a much bigger breach). The company duly notified its users and the Baden-Württemberg data protection authority.
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Interesting stuff: this German region’s equivalent of the ICO applied a fine to this app for failing to hash
passwords, describing them as personal information that was inadequately protected following their theft. That’s interesting because it sets a German, and to a lesser extend a European,
precedent that plaintext passwords can be considered personal information and therefore allowing the (significant) weight of the GDPR to be applied to their misuse.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's
reposted.
Earlier this month I had the good fortune to attend Material, a conference that explores the concept of the web as a material and all the intrinsic characteristics that entails. The
variety of talks provided new perspectives on what it means to build for – and with – the web, and prompted me to …
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What it means for something to be of the web has been discussed many times before. While the technical test can be reasonably objective – is it addressable, accessible and available – culturally it remains harder to judge. But I don’t know about you, I’ve found that
certain websites feel more ‘webby’ than others.
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Despite being nonspecific on the nature of the feeling he describes, Paul hits the nail on the head. Your favourite (non-Medium) blog or guru site almost certainly has that feel of
being “of the web”. Your favourite API-less single-page app (with the growing “please use in Chrome” banner) almost
certainly does not.