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telstar1

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I believe it has a 60-day timeout.

Link

Telstar


Edit:
Might want to be careful. This site exposes everybody's user information in a flat text file on their server.
 
Something smells fishy here but what the heck....why would MS want to hire an outside company to do this work.
 


<< Something smells fishy here but what the heck....why would MS want to hire an outside company to do this work. >>



They do a lot of marketing through external companies. I recall something with Office XP through these guys...and then there was that Windows XP kit from Catalyst Marketing.
 
ok, I am not new, just never posted here before, and I specially signed up for this. I was trying to verify if this site was legit (which I doubt now) I discovered that all entered data on this site is accessible by anyone on the web. I am not going into specifics to avoid the obvious problems, but this is a problem waiting to get huge. It would be hard to believe that a company like this would be allowed to do the direct marketing for Microsoft.😱
 


<< I was trying to verify if this site was legit (which I doubt now) >>



I believe this is legit, but that doesn't mean that it is being handled professionally or securely. Like Mthrboard said in his post, Microsoft hires outside marketing companies, like Catalyst, to handle these programs.

I got my copy of WinXP for $40 throught the Catalyst program, but they completely screwed up the response and fulfillment. They confirmed with a wrong e-mail address for their own company (catalyst.com vs. catalyst.net I think it was) that required a bunch of work on my part to clear up - plus the additional security issues involved with replying to the wrong address.

I finally received my copy of XP about 10 weeks later - would have rather spent the extra $50 and purchased it the standard way.
 


<< ok, I am not new, just never posted here before, and I specially signed up for this. I was trying to verify if this site was legit (which I doubt now) I discovered that all entered data on this site is accessible by anyone on the web. I am not going into specifics to avoid the obvious problems, but this is a problem waiting to get huge. It would be hard to believe that a company like this would be allowed to do the direct marketing for Microsoft.😱 >>



What he said... this is all being saved to an unencrypted text file, and I just took a nice look at all 309K of it.

Be very wary...
 
I was part of the winXP/lavalamp deal too, so I do realize they use external resources. But I also have a sense for business, and it does NOT make sense to contract a company that does not care at all about security and has incompetent programmers (I am sorry, but using frontpage to generate some code for you, and thinking it is all working and secure does not make you a programmer). There is also reference to an email address on a different domain, which I verified, but could not find useful info about the company.

I suggest people that signed up for this contact this company AND microsoft before this gets out of hand.

 
Just wanted to confirm that anyone can access the information sent. Easily.

I second that this is a problem. I just signed up ;(
 
im2smrt4u,

Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with Microsoft's security because

a) Microsoft doesn't host this server
b) Microsoft did not write the code
c) this is not exploiting a flaw, it is just bad programming

I was hoping this would not turn into a "let's bash MS party".

 
Thanks for the link!

So someone else can get my address... it's an apartment (temporary) anyway. It's fine to tell people the security flaw, but constant bashing here won't accomplish anything. Just don't sign up if you're concerned.
 
NICE security.

There's about 2200 requests since midnight, 14 hours ago.

EDIT: Doh! About 18 people list Anandtech as the source, including 2 CEOs and 1 President. LOL.
 
omg! 😱 at first I thought all this talk about plain text file was just to scare everyone, but a little digging and I found the file! Everyone info is there! Stay away from it as far as possible!.. I got the VS.NET Academic from the academic event last time anyways 😛
 
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