This situation does appear to be different however, in that Cisco was making moves to obfuscate the true nature of the vulnerability -- not a wise idea.
Cisco is a large company. They obviously didn't know the extent of the problem until it was demonstated to them.
It was irresponsible for Mike to go ahead with his talk
without allowing Cisco time to reassess the threat.
Put yourself in Cisco's shoes: someone points out a
vulnerability, they tell you about it, you spend 6 months
fixing a zillion IOS images, release the images and the
security alert, and then BAM!, the individual says, "by the
way, it was much worse then I initially told you and I plan
to talk about it in about 2 months". At that point, you
would need some time to understand what the issues
are an formulate a response. Perhaps up to six months.
And it is irrisponsible to disclose the vulnerability
without allowing Cisco time to assess the problem. Mike
could have found an even bigger issue. Perhaps Cisco
needed to research it further.
Slashdot Mirror
(forgive me, but someone had to make the joke)
Cisco is a large company. They obviously didn't know the extent of the problem until it was demonstated to them. It was irresponsible for Mike to go ahead with his talk without allowing Cisco time to reassess the threat. Put yourself in Cisco's shoes: someone points out a vulnerability, they tell you about it, you spend 6 months fixing a zillion IOS images, release the images and the security alert, and then BAM!, the individual says, "by the way, it was much worse then I initially told you and I plan to talk about it in about 2 months". At that point, you would need some time to understand what the issues are an formulate a response. Perhaps up to six months. And it is irrisponsible to disclose the vulnerability without allowing Cisco time to assess the problem. Mike could have found an even bigger issue. Perhaps Cisco needed to research it further.
take a look at this page for some computer algebra software reviews:
http://math.unm.edu/~wester/cas_review.html
For CA, I use maxima and for numerical work,
I use the Numerical Python package or Octave.