partialy in jest but what I mean we often come across sitess that have issues and boils down to unsalted weak security hashing. In that you only find out about

partialy in jest but what I mean we often come across sitess that have issues and boils down to unsalted weak security hashing. In that you only find out about such weakness's when things go wrong. Certainly MD5 I'd say less in jest but as for SHA1 and any hashing that is found to have flaws and known about for a while the ongoing use is really down to its working don't touch it. Now if you have a site using say MD5 or SHA1 hashing unsalted and they get attacked and leaked then the attacked can brute force those hash's into plain text. If a site works and uses poor security and is not attacked then what forced them to maintain there security or improve it as it is seemed just to work. Sadly hindsite and reaction to security issues or break ins with password hash tables stolen for many sites is when they do something and that is retrospectively. So in a way a law that forced or even focused site owners to deal with problems before they are problems would only be good for joe publics privacy. Maybe a law or other means are the way, maybe not. But certainly the current situaton and attitude by some managment in companies towards there IT people with regards to them wanting to fix issues that are not obviously an issue now can only but help. I know and I'm sure others have known of situations in IT when the IT people want to do something to fix a potentual problem and yet budgets prevent them as it is not an issue and certainly from my experience of companies that use ITIL or other approaches they bias towards retrospective approach's in contrast to proactive ones. So if it takes a law to focus and support the IT people in companies to enable them to do the right thing then it can only be good.