Full Disclosure and Why Vendors Hate It

An anonymous reader writes "Well known iPhone hacker Jonathan Zdziarski gave a talk at O'Reilly's Ignite Boston 3 this week in which he called for the iPhone hacking community to embrace full disclosure and stop keeping secrets that were leading to the iPhone's demise. He has followed up with an article about full disclosure and why vendors hate it. He argues that vendor-only disclosure protects the vendors and not the consumer, and that vendors easily abuse this to downplay privacy concerns while continuing to sell insecure products. In contrast, he paints full disclosure as a capitalist means to keep the vendor accountable, and describes how public outcry can be one of the best motivating factors to get a vulnerability addressed."

Comments

Re:From the article:

[hyades1]

Admitting that it's a generalization, and there are many exceptions, he's right. Women in IT are every bit as good as the guys. But when you get into the world most of us inhabit, where all you know is what you've picked up on your own or from a couple of buddies in the field, men rule.

I challenge anybody to find among their non-geek friends and relatives an equal number of women who are willing to swap a video card or install an extra drive, or do minor OS mods. Perfect example: A friend of mine's father (in his 80's) is quite able to make a computer do what he wants and if you drop off a DVD writer at his house, he'll have it properly installed in 10 minutes. His wife loves what you can do with a computer (chatting with relatives "back home", etc.), but was totally stuck when their machine hung on shutdown.