What Heartbleed Can Teach The OSS Community About Marketing

I remember when the antivirus companies would fight about who gets to name what. Didn't one try to name Slammer "Sapphire" after a stripper an engineer had seen the previous night?

I don't look fondly on those days.

Ironic that the blog talking about this is a rather boring looking site that I've just navigated away from as soon as I got the gist. Not meaning to be hash but that's what I did...

Don't overdo it either. There's plenty of landing pages with non-existing services, no need for crazy project pages where the projects themselves will die soon out of interest or are just subpar.

In this specific case, I would prefer resources spent to make the OpenSSL library itself better instead of the https://www.openssl.org/ domain better.

That being said I agree with the article and love how http://heartbleed.com/ was done.

"The Heartbleed announcement ... is masterful communication."

You have to be kidding me. It took so long to decipher what I wanted to know that I went elsewhere.

Edit: "masterful communication" this is not, since the reader doesn't know who the page is aimed at. Even a line at the top saying "Technical people go _here_", and then something aimed at technical people would be better.

I'm not sure how big a part the name and branding, per se, played in the wide reaction to this vulnerability. I would argue that people reacted because they knew it was incredibly serious, impacting almost every site out there. Further a lot of the reaction was by security and infrastructure people and organizations who themselves were impacted and vulnerable, despite every best practice.

In contrast to OpenSSL, the YAML vulnerability was just a very minor blip of importance.