Slashdot Mirror
Google Says No More Cash For Trash Web Bugs
Trailrunner7 writes "It's bound to happen: you create a cool, forward looking incentive program designed to tap the 'wisdom of the crowd' and help make your products better, only to find out that, in fact, the 'crowd' isn't all that wise — and now wants you to pay cold, hard cash for their tepid ideas. That's the experience that Google appears to have had since announcing that it would extend its bounty program for bugs from its Chromium platform to the various Web applications that the company owns. In an updated blog post this week, the company said it has already committed to some $20,000 in bounties, but also provided some 'clarification' to the terms of the reward program, saying that — in essence — not all bugs are equal and that researchers dumping low priority vulnerabilities shouldn't expect to get much in return. 'The review committee has been somewhat generous this first week,' wrote Google's Security Team in a blog post. 'We've granted a number of awards for bugs of low severity, or that wouldn't normally fall under the conditions we originally described.'"
i've never heard of such images called anything except "tracking pixels"... as the image placed on the web site for tracking is generally a 1x1 image consisting of a single transparent pixel.
I get your point, but it seems a somewhat natural word associated with eavesdropping and listening devices. A near-invisible way to tap into the activity of the visitor of a web page. The phone is bugged. The website is bugged.
In practice, many non-technical users are STILL more likely to refer to computer flaws as "glitches" (and not even distinguishing hardware, software and human error) instead of "bugs."
[
you're using bug as a verb in your examples... i'm talking about "bug" as a noun. "tracking pixel" is the industry standard term.
I don't really care how long you've been doing web development. Perhaps you haven't been paying enough attention. Perhaps you've been too wrapped up in the developer terminology that your not so familiar with what the ordinary user typically calls it. I've been doing development just as long as you and I've heard the term countless times. "Tracking pixel" is not a word that non-developers typically use. Just with a really quick google search, here's a result from 1999
http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Marketing/web_bug.html
And your complaint about his usage...verb vs noun, "bug" is a dual purpose word where the verb form is the action of applying the noun form. Much like label. I label a jar with a label. I also bug your phone with a bug. Are you seriously unfamiliar with the term "bug" used in the noun form related to eavesdropping? It's not really new. Oxford English Dictionary has documented this usage going back to 1946.