Microsoft bounty to disrupt virus writers?

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Another misguided effort

It is so foolish, and short sighted to punish intelligence, rather than identify ways to harness all that creative energy. This is the same "stick" approach that DRM takes. Where's the carrot?
The quality of programming education has continued to decline since machine language ceased to be widely taught. Most commercial programmers today have never had more than one semester of assembly language, because there are few teachers capable of teaching assembler. Thus we have a situation where programmers are doing their best to write good code, but their fundamentals are lacking because they have never been taught good root fundamentals. We have the blind leading the blind. Hackers & crackers dig to the core, and find the flaws. Should we fault them for being inquisitive, and identifying poor programming practices? Is Microsoft's "bounty" really the best use of their resources? Or would it make more sense to reward those who identify programming abnormalities, so the problems could be remedied BEFORE they cause widespread pain, and so the original commercial coders could LEARN from those more talented than themselves, and thus improve the quality of the entire programming world. Darn if this doesn't sound just like the methodology used in the Linux world! Microsoft could have on staff the brightest programming talent in the world, and never add those individuals to their payroll overhead, by paying, let's say, $10,000 for identified "small" security flaws, or $50,000 for "large" security flaws. It would be MUCH LESS expensive than the current approach, and MUCH MORE valuable in terms of ROI. You can't improve the breed, if you don't incent positive change. Negative challenges never have to be incented. Have we learned nothing over the past 50+ years?

Posted by: swampfox69   Posted on: 11/07/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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