Hacker News Reader

Comment by worthless-trash | Hacker News Reader

> That's how corporations operate in 2022. If you're a journalist from the Washington Post, you might get a three-line statement from a spokesperson. Everyone else gets a canned reply from a bot, or nothing at all.

This is not true, I write to AMD security team for spectre/meltdown/CPU flaws and get reasonable responses. Intel security team is also quite good. The usual wait time is 3-4 days.

Admittedly I do write from my work address.

View on HN

I answer engineers from other companies all the time but never answer journalists. Engineers give a vibe of “cares about what you do and wants to collaborate”.

Talking to journalists is like talking to the police - as an engineer you don’t understand the situation well enough and you need to involve an (expensive) professional to navigate it.

The question going through my head when I get journalist emails is “can I ignore this and save the hours of work with legal/pr?”.

True that

On most places only the PR team is even allowed to talk to journalists. Exactly because that "is like talking to the police" issue.

It's a very sensible and correct policy.

Thats a good point, I had never thought of that.

That's great, but I suspect the address you write from indeed plays a big part here. Direct responses from engineers of that caliber within a matter of days is most certainly not standard.

Probably somewhere in A.A. County.

What’s your work, out of curiosity? I suppose security researcher?

Red Hat Kernel security team.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com