Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
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Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#2He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox. In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.
Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#3He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox. In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.
One can only hope that the next generation will find a way to blow whistles into cell phones to get free calls.
Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#4He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox. In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.
This should go in your next hiring post. "Who we're looking for: Somebody with the chops to dig into code that has passed professional inspection and do horrible, horrible things to it. Someone who can find a stack overflow in document.write. Someone like you, because if you can program we will teach you these and other dark arts. The last stack overflow in Firefox was found by a 12 year old. Are you going to let yourself lose to a 12 year old?"
Sidenote: I think I have a guess based on a prior conversation, but for the edification of HNers: $3,000 is how many orders of magnitude below the market worth of that vulnerability?
Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#5He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox. In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.
This should go in your next hiring post. "Who we're looking for: Somebody with the chops to dig into code that has passed professional inspection and do horrible, horrible things to it. Someone who can find a stack overflow in document.write. Someone like you , because if you can program we will teach you these and other dark arts. The last stack overflow in Firefox was found by a 12 year old. Are you going to let yo…
Assuming it is reliably exploitable and packaged with the exploit, $3,000 is substantially less than what that vulnerability is worth. As with everything, it depends on how aggressively you sell it, and whether you believe in an immortal soul.
I can't tell you exactly how much though because I'm busy tracking down his email address so we can be his 8th grade internship.
Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#6Good for him! If he keeps this up, he's going to be an awesome programmer.
Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#7He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox. In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.
Don't think the number of clever kids changed much over the year. It's just much harder to spot them, because everyone and their dog is "doing computers" now.
Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#8Good for him! If he keeps this up, he's going to be an awesome programmer.
That or he'll ruin the whole Internet and then do a dissertation on stochastic congestion control.
Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#9I'm sorry, but I can't help but see this and think of all the kids around this age who are prevented from earning money by child labor laws, and the idea that this kid is a "Slave" because he's "too young to make decisions for himself. It may sound like this is a ridiculous thing to say, but just yesterday someone was making this claim in another forum.
I was busy writing a game at that age with the intent to sell it. Unfortunately, at that time there were no good distribution methods for independant games.
But I think the desire of some people who are well meaning but narrow in their worldview to "protect" children really prevents a lot of children from achieving as much as they would like, and are capable of.
When I finally was allowed to work, I remember several years where I had to work part time, even during the summers, because of these laws. One of my first jobs was a programming job, and I learned a whole lot from a senior programmer. I was 14 or 15, he was mid 20s. I wonder how much more I would have learned if I hadn't been prevented from working as much as I wanted because of state mandated limits on the number of hours. I can recall many times when he was explaining something to me, and it was getting really good, but I had to leave.
Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
#10Here's the advisory, with link to the bug (require login to see bug).
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2010/mfsa2010-65.ht...