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Comment by bhousel | Hacker News Reader

Maybe MITRE should assign proper names to serious CVEs, kind of like hurricanes?

Oh, great. Then in a few years we can have minor security issues given names, too. Like how winter storms this past winter were called "Polar Vortexes." This world needs less media sensationalism, not more.

"Polar vortex" has been in the lexicon of meteorologist for decades now.

Media sensationalism is important when it's a very serious issue.

Security issues of this calibre need more media sensationalism.

That is not sensationalism. Much the opposite.

Giving the appropriate importance to things is part of what makes good journalism.

They can just use NSA-style semi-random codenames. Every CVE can be automatically assigned a pair of words out of a hat. It'll be particularly beautiful when combined with already-silly software names. I want to have to tell my boss that Raring Ringtail has been affected by Nevada Horseshoe or somesuch.

Please don't joke about this kind of stuff.

MOODLE is an eminently useful free software course management system. A PHB I used to work for got very worried about the 'silly name' and the lack of an 0845 number for when anything went wrong. Took ages to convince him that it was a sensible alternative to another well known course management system that cost a couple of teacher salaries per year.

We got there.

"Polar vortex" is not a proper name. Complaining about that is like complaining that we have given names to things like "buffer overflow bug" or "double free".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex

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