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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

#41

Post by edanm »

tptacek wrote: post #2

He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox. In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.

These stories always make me think of another bug that is unbelievable.

The bug is in Binary Search - one of the most fundamental algorithms in programming. It's been around in a published implementation of Binary Search since 1986, and the implementation of Binary Search for the JDK was broken for 9 years. This bug was only discovered in 2006, when someone's program broke.

If you haven't heard of it, read more here: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...

Quick Summary - to get the "middle" element of the array, the line is this: int mid = (low + high) / 2;. This overflows when low + high is larger than MAX_INT, causing havoc.

Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system

#42

Post by clistctrl »

eogas wrote: post #27

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.

To be fair, you can get a pretty decent computer today for < $500. That is still quite a bit of money if you're poor, but its a far reach from the $2000 you might have paid several years ago.

Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system

#43

Post by points »

varun43in wrote: post #35

wow, I guess it goes to show how much younger people these days are when getting into programming. good for him :D

I don't think that's the case. As an 80s home computing revolution kid, quite a lot of kids were into BASIC etc. To a certain extent we've lost that now.

We grew up in a time where you could buy a computer and you pretty much had to learn how to program it. Now, you can get away without needing to learn.

Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system

#44

Post by jawee »

dekz wrote: post #24
jawee wrote: post #14

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...

local bookstore? I had to find a news agent that sold it far from where I lived, the download size would've taken weeks to finish.

Well, bookstores around me had the $40 to $50 behemoth tech books with an installer in the back. Redhat looked the simplest, or it the cheapest.. I don't recall which.

Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system

#45

Post by Hubbert »

gruseom wrote: post #26

Here are two pieces of evidence that this boy was fortunate in his choice of parents: 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…

Yeah, but I think "his parents' very technical books" is a little more central.

During my first few weeks of college, I asked my mother to buy a book on UNIX if she ran across one. She blanched and said "What on earth for?"

Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system

#47

Post by Hubbert »

WozRocks wrote: post #33
tptacek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I miss the part of the article where they took his $3,000 check away?

No, but most people from both political parties support the laws that prevent people from hiring kids his age. I think he was only able to get the $3,000 because it was a bounty or a "Contest", and not a "job" or "employment". I think bug bounties shouldn't be the only way this kid is allowed to earn money. He's proven himself to have discipline and some responsibility. He should be allowed to go work for a startup,…

There's actually an upside, though: labor laws force kids to get creative and pursue activities which are at least entrepreneurial and generally more educational than the dead-end McJob that might first come to mind for them. But I do think that kids should be better educated about the limitations on what they really can and can't do rather than just suffer under a blanket misperception "you can't work until you're 16."

I really think that experiences such as yours, where you were invited into a white-collar world, are the rare exception (heck, people with solid bachelors' degrees have trouble getting that sort of job now!).

Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system

#48

Post by Indyan »

jeebusroxors wrote: post #23
_delirium wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can only hope that the next generation will find a way to blow whistles into cell phones to get free calls.

For those who don't know: early phone hackers (phreaks/phreakers) discovered that a 2600hz tone would indicate a trunk was idle, reset and listen for a new call. Since the line was not actually hung up the billing system wouldn't activate leading to free phone calls. Some people learned to whistle the tone, while others used bird calls, and even a whistle given free by Captain Crunch (the cereal). http://en.wikipedia…

I remember reading about this in iWoz and thinking "WTF! This is serioualy cool".

Re: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system

#49

Post by eogas »

mahmud wrote: post #28
eogas wrote: post #27

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.

WTH? 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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Deception

And good on them, for making the most of what they had. I'm pretty sure I made the most of what I had, I just didn't grow up in a situation that encouraged hacking. At the age this kid (in the original story) is fixing bugs, I was experiencing the internet for the first time. I didn't grow up with computers at my disposal. My grade school used Apple IIe's, over 10 years after they came out. I didn't grow up around other kids who were interested in computers. I didn't even grow up around adults who were interested in computers. I didn't know that there was such a thing as being interested in computers until I was about this kid's age.

Rest assured, I started tinkering in 8th grade, and taught myself various programming languages all through high school. At this point, I made the most of what I had. I just didn't get the ridiculous head start that some kids are allowed.

This isn't to say that I'm not satisfied with the way my situation played out. I could have never used a computer until college, and I'd be going for a degree in History or something. It's so ingrained in my mind that I want to do this for the rest of my life that I can't imagine what I would do if I hadn't been interested in computers and programming. And I'm glad for this. And I'm glad that there are kids in high school who know way more than I do.

So when I say it makes me bitter, it is solely a cathartic response to something that doesn't really concern me. Would I like to have grown up in a better scenario? You bet your ass. Does it matter now? No. It's not a damn race.

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