To govern the social internet

Recently, the folks behind Reddit.com confessed that a backup copy of their database had been stolen. Reddit developers confirmed their data contained user passwords. Reddit admits the information was stored as plain, unprotected text.

Reddit’s response seems poor:

[quote]
what a week…
Again, we’re sorry about yesterday’s outage — the DNS troubles were entirely our fault.

On a separate note, we want to make you aware that media of ours that contained a backup of a portion of the reddit database was stolen recently.

Although the media did not contain any personally identifiable information about our users and we have no reason to believe that reddit data was the target of the theft, we wanted to alert you to the possibility that your username, password, and — in some cases — e-mail address may have been compromised.
[unquote]

Puts an entirely new meaning to ‘fire in the theatre’.

Darn. Perhaps you see an annoying light on the film screen?
Sorry. We’ve opened the doors.

We’re quite sure you’re not the target of the arsonist,
but there’s a good chance you’ll burn if you fail to notice the fire.

If sites using our property fail as poorly as Reddit in this case,
we WILL need law to govern errors, omissions and disclosure.