There are too many names on that list - not to contact, but to trust. To everyone that you give secret advance notice, you're potentially handing a zero-day.
That's true. Have they contacted them now? Do these places which will only fix a problem if they're shamed into it actually know that they are on the wall of shame?
More to the point: has a widespread public vulnerability ever before been released alongside a list of everyone who is vulnerable to it? I can't recall such a thing ever happening.
The same folks providing the list this time around also made one for Heartbleed. It was posted roughly the same time as the initial disclosure, from what I recall.
This sort of proves my point from another comment: they stopped updating the list shorting after it was posted, and so all of these domains are forever stuck on the shame list.
Viewing domains from the Alexa top 1M list so many times today also makes it very clear that it is total crap.
> You would think someone commenting on such an important and controversial story in tech like this would fully disclose that she is in-fact friends with Emil and worked with him?
Yes Nicole did, right at the end of her article. As I mentioned in another reply, even sites like Techcrunch who are no strangers to half-baked journalism themselves disclose conflicts of interest at the beginning of their articles. It is misleading in my opinion.
And all that she's reporting is her own judgements of the incident and a light confirmation that the conversation took place. She confirms almost every detail that the buzzfeed article states, including the suggestion of targeting Sarah Lacy's personal life.
They built different narratives of the event, largely colored by the biases of each. The journalist had a bias towards building sensation and the friend had a bias towards downplay. If you don't read news articles expecting the bias of a journalist, then I'm sorry, I don't know what you are doing. But until that ending line in the article, she was a well-placed, mostly unbiased, bystander.
As long as she disclosed it at all I have no qualms with the position of said disclosure in the article. Perhaps if it was a 10 page article I would have a problem but it's 6 paragraphs! If a reader's attention span is that short it's their own fault.
> If a reader's attention span is that short it's their own fault.
It's not [necessarily] about attention span. Most people don't have time to read in entirety every single article that they come across.
I'm sure you've skimmed articles, or read just the first paragraph or two and decided it wasn't that interesting (maybe the subject matter was different than what you expected from the headline or maybe the article was poorly written).
In this particular case disclosing a potential conflict of interest at the beginning is important because it's helpful to keep the potential conflict in mind when reading it. Some people may prefer not reading it all because of the conflict of interest so disclosing it early on can save the reader's time. [i.e. I wouldn't bother reading an article on net neutrality written by a friend of Comcast's CEO]
I'm going to join the chorus of people who think that her disclosure was clear enough, and that your critique of it seems be a needlessly uncharitable reading and/or mean-spirited.
> Most of the pro-vaccine organizations claim that the main/only reason people avoid vaccinations is because they (falsely) believe that vaccines are the cause of the autism epidemic
Neat, a recursive strawman. Is there a word for that?
Anyway, I don't know if you count the CDC as a 'pro-vaccine organization' but they are aware of and have responses to multiple misconceptions about vaccines.
No, I don't. You're searching for some total order ranking function where there isn't one. People love who they love and a lot of that is based on proximity and shared experience. I demonstrably care more about my dog than I do any random child in the third world, as demonstrated by the fact that I fed my dog this morning and I haven't donated to a feed-a-child-in-the-third-world charity today. By your logic, since humans rank higher than dogs, am I morally obligated to exhaust my financial resources helping needy humans before I can take care of my dog?
I think that was trying to be a pastiche of/homage to/rip off Woody Allen's bit on Mechanical Objects, which it's very similar to. (Excerpted and linked below)
> I have never in my life had good relationships with mechanical objects of any sort. [...]
> About three years ago I couldn't stand it anymore. I was home one night. I called a meeting with my possessions. I got everything I owned into the living room. My toaster, my clock, my blender. They never been in the living room before. And I spoke to them. I opened with a joke. And then I said "I know what's going on, and cut it out!" I have a sun lamp, but as I sit under it, it rains on me. And I spoke to each appliance, I was really articulate. Then I put them back, and I felt good.
> Two nights later I'm watching my portable television set, and the set begins to jump up and down, and I go up to it. And I always talk before I hit, and I said "I thought we had discussed this, what's the problem?" And the set kept going up and down, so I hit it, and it felt good hitting it, and I beat the hell out of it. I was really great, I tore off the antenna, and I felt very virile.
> And two days later I go to my dentist in New York. I had gone to my dentist, but I had a deep cavity, and he'd sent me to a chiropodist. I'm going into a building in mid-town New York, and they have those elevators, and I hear a voice say "Kindly call out your floors, please", and I say "sixteen" and the doors close and the elevator starts going up to sixteen. And on the way up the elevator says to me "Are you the guy that hit the television set?" I felt like an ass, y'know, and it took me up and down fast between floors, and it threw me off in the basement. It yelled out something that was anti-semetic.
Ah, given that context, that makes more sense / comes off a little less nefarious. I think it was mostly the references to forgetting an anniversary, trying to repair the relationship with a heart-to-heart by candlelight, etc., that took it to a kind of weird place for me.
To be fair, the Woody Allen joke is also allegorically about domestic violence and this updated version only reinforced those references, so I don't think your reaction was off base.
For even more context, around the same time as the Woody Allen stand-up Hunter S. Thompson gets confronted on CBC by a member of Hells Angels. It shows in stark contrast how much society has matured in 50 years (at least regarding public acceptance of domestic violence). You should really watch the clip, but I've again excerpted choice quotes from the Hells Angels member that the audience reacts favorably to.
(At 3:24 in the video)
> Junkie George is beating his old lady. Junkie George's dog bit him. To me this is a personal feud. If a guy wants to beat his wife and his dog bites him, that's between the three of 'em. [Audience laughter and applause]
and a short time later (5:42 in the video):
> To keep a woman in line you got to beat her like a rug once in a while. [Again, audience laughter and applause]
Wow, that was a pretty surprising video. The audience's reaction especially surprised me. While maybe not quickly enough, times have certainly changed.
He talks about the calculator like it's his wife. He mentions their anniversary, and has a candlelit dinner. And he punches it causing irreparable damage.
