Today I did an interesting experiment. As you may or may not know, big software companies have to handle security issues with many techniques. One of the techniques used recently is known as “bug bounties”. The idea is to pay independent security researchers/hackers who report vulnerabilities and bugs in critical programs (browsers, websites, applications,…), before they are disclosed publicly. The idea is that anybody who’s not an employee of these companies can participate. There are even a few example of junior high school kids who get pretty good amounts of money for reporting such security issues.
So what I did is look for the “bug bounty” programs of a few big projects/companies, and looked for the first results:
). So, yeah, please don’t take this too seriously <– this is my way of warning people now that my posts might be completely far fetched, sarcastic, have bad humor, etc…
As a “console hacker”, I am often interested in articles that make a confusion between hackers, crackers, pirates… not so long ago, I was myself not sure what all these terms meant and what differences they conveyed. It of course now frustrates me to the highest point when people read about HBL and compare me to a pirate, or to those black hat groups that steal people’s information and credit card numbers stored on private networks.
I can hate Sony to my guts for their crappy software and their locking policy, but we have to admit their hardware usually rocks, for a reasonable price (ok, maybe not the Vaio, but again, that’s mostly because of the crapware they put in it). The same can probably not be said of this Chinese “replica” of the PS Vita, named the “Yinlips”.