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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RTev who wrote (28887)	8/30/1999 4:00:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

On the Hotmail hole issue, ZDNet gives more details about the problem and says that Microsoft took the service down for several hours today to plug it. In order to fix the problem, they apparently had to break one of the main "features" of MSN Messenger which will no longer open Hotmail messages directly. Read the comments to this story and you'll see that it does present a more general PR problem. Even though Hotmail actually runs on Unix machines and not on NT, the security breach story has Microsoft's name prominently attached to it and that ripples over to other Microsoft products like NT. Huge Hotmail security flaw reported zdnet.com The Hotmail snafu is sure to reignite debate about privacy and security on the Web, as well as direct more criticism toward Microsoft Corp., which owns Hotmail. The site allowed any Web user access to people's Hotmail accounts simply by typing in a Hotmail's user name. Once the name was entered, the Hotmail account and mailbox for that account were easily viewed. Messages, in many cases, could be read or forwarded. ... The problem wasn't a small hole that only a technically adept hacker could exploit. With this hole, anyone with access to a short HTML script, already widely circulated, could open Hotmail accounts. ...