Journalist questioned by police after reporting Facebook security flaw

It's this kind of reaction that makes our technological toys less secure. It's this kind of reaction that the Ominous Large Corporation wants us to have.

The standard belief is as follows: being proactive about privacy and security costs money, and if we don't have to spend money we won't. Most people, the ones we're crowdsourcing or selling to advertisers, don't understand and won't care who actually screwed up - we'll blame the hackers and that will limit negative perceptions.

This is certainly the correct approach to take individually.

Advantage to you of trying to disclose the flaw: zero in most cases.

Disadvantage to you of trying to disclose the security flaw: possibly years in jail, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent.

It's unfortunate that this is true, but it's true nonetheless. The country needs a Computer Good Samaritan law, where those who follow a prescribed process for flaw disclosure are granted complete immunity from prosecution, civil suits and general harassment.

Perhaps it's a misunderstanding of Australian police investigations, but I wouldn't expect them to arrest a witness. If Grubb was really arrested, that suggests (to this American who doesn't know anything about Aussie police) that someone accused him of a crime. Facebook has a motive; they want journalists to think twice before reporting on Facebook privacy flaws. Nobody else seems to have a motive. Not that there's any point in jumping to conclusions at this point -- surely there will be more information available soon.

Presumably CDN servers whose job is just to serve up the content, not to deal with who is logged in or who has access to view which content?