Autodesk, please turn the discussion groups off NOW

Autodesk, please turn the discussion groups off NOW

You’re exposing some people’s email addresses as user names. Not mine, as far as I can tell, but it’s hard to say for sure because the search is broken. Anyway, this is very obviously A Bad Thing and you should not be allowing the site to be publicly visible that state.

3 Comments

  1. I know my Autodesk login ID is an email address, so I would guess it’s the same for many. My visible user name is different, though. The Autodesk discussion groups are splattered with lots of email address user names, and I can’t imagine so many people deliberately providing their email addresses as visible user names.

  2. Earl Kubaskie

    I wasn’t given a choice for my subscription center ID – it was assigned to me as my email addy. The subscription center is private, so no big deal…

    But on the discussion groups the posts go out over NNTP. Many users have set up sigs under their mail/NNTP client that actually give their name – and for some that name is now associated with an email address… and maybe the name and address of their company…

    Steve’s right – this exposes you to an increased spam load at least. It also exposes your email address in context, which could help phishermen come up with something that might fool you.

    There may already have been some attempts – a thread on the AUGI CWC forum has been going about emails some have received subjected on the website login change, with links… but the emails don’t come from Autodesk and something smells phishy.

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