Crap, I Missed It, a new notification service, looks to tell users about various news or events that they specify. For example, you can set Crap to tell you about the month's top Digg stories, your favorite sports team's scores, or an upcoming concert for your favorite band in your area, via email. The information is all combined into a maximum of one email per day.
Crap, I Missed It sends email notifications for the things that are important to you.
The site itself needs some work on the design and usability front. Their actual service does what its advertised to do, but lacks somewhat in the department of originality. I really dig the concert notifications, although Ticketmaster already does the exact same thing with their alerts system. You can already get sports notifications from a variety of services as well. Crap, I Missed It is useful in that it brings these different types of notifications together.
Michael Baldwin of Crap, I Missed It told us some things that we can expect in the future. Those include automatic populating of CD alerts based on your Last.FM account or iTunes, RSS/web page monitoring, price change monitoring for hotels, airfare, etc., support for more sites such as Craigslist, and RSS/SMS/social networking notifications instead of email. So, go give the service a shot and let us know if you think it's worth your attention of if it's just crap.
One of the many examples of plain text passwords being transmitted through email.
Nothing strikes fear into our hearts like seeing one of our secret passwords, that we have guarded with our lives (well, maybe not so much), displayed in plain text. Even though you would be hard pressed to find anyone who approves of the practice, we find many websites that greet their new users with an email containing their super-secret password. As you open that email you almost feel betrayed. The password that you have worked so hard to protect is right there in front of your eyes.
Even if there is no significant security risk to transmitting passwords via plain text, it gives users the impression that security is not a top priority for the creators of the site. There is no reason for this practice to still be in existence today. Good password management technology for websites is very prevalent. If you can't build a proper password system for your site, just opt for using OpenID or another similar service.
I propose that all sites should have an automated password reset system that either allows the user to create a new password from an authentication link or through a one-time use password, sent to their email. Plain text passwords should never be displayed or sent through email.
No more excuses. Let's squash this lazy practice once and for all.
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