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I hope I'm wrong about this, but surely this media circus just prompts security researchers to keep quiet about flaws they find? Why are we rewarding them with fawning coverage when they've put us all at risk by not disclosing these issues to the browser vendors?

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There will always be some hackers/crackers who will stay underground to hopefully profit from unknown exploits. Events like this encourage these people to share their finding and earn money (and street creed) from it.

Did you know that Google pays people to find exploits for Chrome?

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/01/encouraging-more-chromium-s...

Second paragraph FTA: "So far, little is known about the successful exploits. Until vendors have been informed of the flaws and those flaws have been patched, details will not be made public."

Yes, but how long have the researchers themselves known about these flaws? All that time an actual villain could have discovered the same flaw and exploited it. But instead weeks or months have gone by and for what benefit?

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