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He'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…
He'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.
Some people learned to whistle the tone, while others used bird calls, and even a whistle given free by Captain Crunch (the cereal).
Looks like a fairly default Ubuntu install in the picture. I remember playing with Linux at that age.. fun times. He probably had a better time of it than me struggling with Redhat 6.3 from my local bookstore though...
He'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.
Miller is quick to point out that he's not just playing games; what Alex is doing is learning. "Clearly it's his passion," she says.
"But you still have to do chores," Miller reminds him when he talks of his next debugging mission.
What a delightful story, and so free of the "genius whiz kid" trope that has infected this genre since long before I was that age.
Stories like this always make me bitter, but good on the kid for making the most of his upbringing.
Why oh why couldn't I have been brought up in a white, suburban, upper-middle class family with my own computer and a highspeed internet connection. Stories like this always make me bitter, but good on the kid for making the most of his upbringing.
MOD consisted mainly of poor Brooklyn kids; in fact, some of them were members of street gangs, and taught themselves to hack on school computers. From nowhere to the cover of magazines ..
The wikipedia article sucks, but the lore is out there and well known:
"12-year-old San Jose boy paid bounty for finding security hole in Firefox."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Everyone has a story about a friend who sold a vuln for X. At least one case though has been documented in an academic paper by a well respected researcher [1]. (That would put the cheque at [1] http://weis2007.econinfosec.org/papers/29.pdf