Regarding embargoes

tedunangst.com

57 pointsingve2 comments

There was nothing "on purpose" about our confirmation (that the bug Halvar posted on DailyDave was the same as Kaminsky had shared with me). It was a pure accident. The person who accidentally hit the "publish" button on the story wasn't even involved with it; they were doing something else on the blog.

I do appreciate the distinction you made between "confirmation" and "revelation". Most of the media at the time ran with the latter, incorrect concept. It's more fun that way, than that someone was simply able to guess the bug from the embargo description.

Clearly, it's hard to come up with a better example of how much a shitshow PR-enhanced embargoes are. I lean your way in my feelings about embargoes and about cool-kids cliques.

The bigger problem with embargoes are the cloudflares of the world, who use it as a marketing angle (as per the post). I think embargoes don't work, won't work, even if well intentioned. Just get the details out, let people take the steps they need/want in the immediate term, and incentivize the parties involved to fix sooner rather than a usual tardy later.

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