Spotify's latest music dirge: We've been hacked

Hackers were able to penetrate Spotify's computer network, potentially exposing the personal information and passwords of some of the music service's users.

In a company blog announcement, Spotify did not get specific about the extent of the breach. Here's part of the post:

Along with passwords, registration information such as your email address, birth date, gender, postal code and billing receipt details were potentially exposed. Credit card numbers are not stored by us and were not at risk. All payment data is handled by a secure 3rd party provider.

If you have an account that was created on or before December 19, 2008, we strongly suggest that you change your password and strongly encourage you to change your passwords for any other services where you use the same password.

The company, based in Europe, was not immediately available for comment so it was unclear how many of its users were affected or to what extent. But in an article published by Britain's Guardian, the newspaper's technology correspondent reported that "thousands of users' personal details may have been stolen by hackers."

[3rdalbum]

Amateur Hour on the Internet: Websites storing user passwords in a database, rather than hashed passwords.

This is what happens when they employ "web designers" rather than "web developers".

[inachu]

Having accounts at all for a service like this is just to spread around liability.

[inachu]

I still wonder why we need an account to log into this free music streaming service.
So far the only plan is to be hacked for user names when really no user names are needed.
User names are used only for complicity with music industry if spotify lost in court and must hand over user names so the users must pay for listening to music for free. Get rid of account names and end users will not be held liable. Why must you make the home user complicit in this scheme?

Better just to have a free program like winamp that does the same thing only better.
Having people needing log in accounts makes others share in your misery.