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July 06, 2007
Auctioning access to your PC
Auctioning access to your PC: Swiss firm starts auctioning off zero-day vulnerabilities. Their press release emphasizes "researchers getting a fair price for their findings". They're currently selling access to Linux kernel, Yahoo Messenger and SquirrelMail -- if these are installed on your machine, they're selling access to your machine without your consent, and without notifying those whose code they're exploiting. Their defense: "Buyers will also be carefully vetted before being granted access to the auction platform so that the risk of selling the right stuff to the wrong people is minimized." Uh-huh. Should the website be allowed to exist? Probably. Should consumers be allowed to sue the ass off these guys for enabling an act of coercion? Probably. It's like someone auctioning a map of unlocked windows in the neighborhood. If money is the goal, then try researching something more useful than exploiting others. More at Techworld and TechCrunch.
Posted by JohnDowdell at July 6, 2007 07:30 AM
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Comments
What a great big grey area of ethical discussion this topic is.
It's one thing to sell the map. It's another thing to use the map in malicious ways.
Posted by: Mark Lapasa at July 6, 2007 10:28 AM