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Someone should start an auction side with one seller (discoverer of vulnerability) and two buyers: Ballmer on one side and blackhatters on the other.

This would make things fair.

Assuming that's legal. I know bugs are sold, sometime openly, but it depends on how FBI wants to see it.

It's probably not legal to knowingly sell an exploit to someone that a reasonable person would believe was going to use it to commit a crime.

Solution: anonymous buyers.

Yup. Anonymous buyers vs. MSFT. Or else! Ballmer cannot dictate his own prices for hot commodity.

If he is smart enough to hire cheapo programmers and suppress creativity and initiative, he has to pay for his technical debt to clean the mess up.

It's all anon, fun and games until the SWAT team shows up :-)

In all seriousness, any package as complex as Windows and Office is bound to have bugs, many, many bugs.

In fact all buyers needs to be anonymous and pay with bitcoins, including MSFT.