(these downvotes are confusing. Do you disagree that it is marketing? That their approach is brutal? That they plan this regularly?)
We should all be so lucky as to have Project Zero handing us free bug reports like that. Responsible companies PAY for bug reports on their products. Google is handing them over for free.
And it had the exact same automatic 90 day disclosure applied: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=944062
"Please note: this bug is subject to a 90 day disclosure deadline. After 90 days elapse or a patch has been made broadly available (whichever is earlier), the bug report will become visible to the public."
In fact they've reported a lot of Chrome vulnerabilities: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/list?colspec...
And Android ones: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/list?colspec...
Hey, look at that! Equal treatment for all.
So it's not "literally no company". ;)
Disclosure: I work for Mozilla and I have reported a number of security bugs on our code, the vast majority of which are now public.
Regardless: that's a good point. I should have said, public disclosure of internal findings is not an industry norm. Mozilla is a good counterexample to the argument that everyone close-holds internal findings.
Of course, as you say, we do rate almost all security issues, and eventually make them public, so the information is only a bugzilla search away! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=sec-critic...
Project Zero has long maintained that any serious company should be able to meet 90 day disclosure timeframe, and yet here comes Google+...
How is that different?
Disclosure is one thing, remediation is another. The former is only instrumental to the latter. In the G+ leak, remediation was swift; so disclosure was not required.
(Btw, the affected accounts were 500K, reportedly, not millions.)
(Disclosure: I work for Google)
And Project Zero has notified that company of their problem.
If the company fixes their problem in a reasonable amount of time, then it's a Win-Win-Win. The users, the company, and Project Zero all win.
If you blame anyone but the companies with bugs that can't fix them in a reasonable amount of time, then your priorities are dead wrong.
Remember, it's not like others would stop looking for these exploits if Google did.
Does Google harming the reputation of a competitor for it's own advantage not cause some societal harm? Or are we still pretending that some businesses are working in our best interests?
If they're harming the competitor's reputation by exposing a legitimate flaw in the competitor's product, I don't think that causes societal harm, no.
Apple could open up their own Project Zero, if they wanted to. Then you'd have two competing companies making each other better, which sounds to me like the ideal of the free market.
Need the right people and perhaps just as importantly the right internal politics.
Lots of businesses struggle with the idea that when the Big Boss says something false it might be OK for a lowly employee to contradict them. I expect that even if Tim Cook thinks he'd be OK with hearing from an Apple engineer that their new product is garbage, Tim's immediate reports will ensure that engineer is fired before news reaches Tim so he thinks it never happens.
What you want in a good company is the CEO takes the bullet. Something bad happened? That's my fault, the buck stops here, I will make sure we do better next time. Big loss? Cut my salary and zero all executive bonuses until we turn it around.
What you see most often is throwing employees under the bus. Something bad happened? We fired the people responsible, I'm putting somebody else on this (read: I am preparing to throw this new person under a bus too). Profits a bit less than anticipated? Fire 1000 people essentially at random to show I'm focused on the problem.
Well it’s not necessarily that simple. Exposing a flaw without adequate time to develop a fix could cause net societal harm. This is especially true if it’s a bug that would have been discovered and fixed internally without any public disclosure.
How was releasing the details 2 days early responsible or beneficial? At best it got customers worked up and made them question Microsoft's patch policies.
Do you think in the intervening 2 days anyone took any actions knowing the patch would arrive Tuesday?
Google hides behind "responsible disclosure" as an excuse for using Project Zero tactically to do PR damage to competitors.
The act of rapid public disclosure compels the target to shift resources and focus to respond to those potential dumps. This can negatively impact the company's strategically and put them in damage control mode.
In the case of Apple, they're not the dominant platform and are trying to pivot to be seen as the the secure and private platform. Google is damaging their credibility with that pivot by investing in finding vulnerabilities in their products and rapidly disclosing them.
Short term this could improve the product but long term it could damage Apple's reputation and further diminish their market share and solidifying Google's.
If Google were funding an independent research team tasked with securing the internet and platforms for the greater good that would be fine. But that isn't Project Zero. Project Zero is a weapon wielded by a company trying to protect it's monopoly.
The fact that this is possibly two faced by google doesn't change the fact that it is a net good if Apple is sincere in their pivot, because they'd want this dealt with anyway and they get them highlighted for free. If Apple just want to be "seen" as secure and private without actually making it so then it's good that it's being exposed as hollow words.
You 'may' have a point with smaller competitors to Google but really Apple is a large enough target that there are other capable threats targeting them that will use these vulnerabilities for worse than just keeping them in line with their marketing material.
What made you settle on this specific one?
90 days is unbelievably conservative. It's frankly ridiculous. Imagine you found weaknesses in a bridge. 90 days to disclose would be insane.
You should check out
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
for some answers.