Dear ZDNet, please please please include a link to the Google contest, not last year's ZDNet coverage of the contest. Thank you.
The article is misleading (although the HN headline is correct!) - the $20k is for compromising Chrome on OSX / Win7. The CR-48 is just an extra price for anyone who does so and is not a candidate target.
Although $20,000 is a nice pile of money, it does not create a notion of confidence.
One more zero would do the job though.
An exploit will be found. But paying $20k for thousands of man hours of security testing is a bargain.