The Case For a Government Bug Bounty Program
Trailrunner7 writes "Bug bounty programs have been a boon for both researchers and the vendors who sponsor them. From the researcher's perspective, having a lucrative outlet for the work they put in finding vulnerabilities is an obvious win. Many researchers do this work on their own time, outside of their day jobs and with no promise of financial reward. The willingness of vendors such as Google, Facebook, PayPal, Barracuda, Mozilla and others to pay significant amounts of money to researchers who report vulnerabilities to them privately has given researchers both an incentive to find more vulnerabilities and a motivation to not go the full disclosure route. This set of circumstances could be an opportunity for the federal government to step in and create its own separate bug reward program to take up the slack. Certain government agencies already are buying vulnerabilities and exploits for offensive operations. But the opportunity here is for an organization such as US-CERT, a unit of ...
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information
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mozilla
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paypal
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trailrunner
us-cert
utility
vulnerability
willingness
Facebook Home Is Losing Steam In The Charts…Fast
Facebook Home, the app which CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted as the “next version of Facebook,” has not been an immediate hit. Its Google Play rankings have been dropping steadily after the launch buzz wore off, according to new data from top app store analytics firms. Despite having an active user base of over a billion on the social network itself, the company announced on Thursday that it was just now “nearing” 1 million downloads for its Home app. Plus, AT&T also slashed pricing this week on the HTC First, the first Facebook Home-powered handset, which went from $99 to just $0.99. The data shows it’s been a struggle so far, in terms of user acquisition, for Facebook Home. The application became available for download on April 12th on Google Play, where only a limited selection of devices were supported: the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II. A preloaded version of the app was made available via the HTC First, which officially went on ...
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Google and Adobe Contribute Open Source Rasterizer to FreeType
alancronin writes with this excerpt from a PC World article: "Users of Android, Chrome OS, Linux, and iOS devices may not realize it, but FreeType open source software is used to render fonts on more than a billion such devices. Not only that, but the FreeType project this week got a significant update from none other than Adobe and Google. Specifically, Google and Adobe on Wednesday released into beta the Adobe CFF engine, an advanced Compact Font Format (CFF) rasterizer that 'paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences,' as Google put it in an online announcement on the Google Open Source Blog. The new rasterizer is now included in FreeType version 2.4.12. Though it's currently off by default, the technology is 'vastly superior' to the old CFF engine and will replace it in the next FreeType release, the project says." The article features examples of how the new engine improves font rendering; for more explanation of the ...
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explanation
freetype
freetype-based
google
ios devices
linux
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Alibaba Group's New Stake In Sina Weibo May Help Its Nascent Smartphone OS Gain Traction Against Android & iOS
Pouring $586 million in Sina Weibo gives Alibaba Group several perks, including an inroad into social media and access to the microblogging platform’s data. Not only that, but its new 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo may also give Alibaba Group a leg-up as it seeks to promote its own smartphone operating system Alibaba Mobile OS (AMOS) as a rival to Android. As the Wall Street Journal writes, Alibaba Group’s investment in Sina Weibo means that it now has access to data generated by the platform’s 46.2 million daily users. This is on top of the 500 million registered users on Taobao, one of Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites. “If you are a big Internet company and you are ambitious enough in the mobile space, you have to do more than apps. Otherwise, you are just a small species in an ecosystem controlled by others,” Alibaba chief strategy officer Zeng Ming told WSJ. Zeng said that Alibaba Group’s target for AMOS is to power 10 percent of all smartphones shipped in China, an ambitious ...
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Facebook Home's Coverfeed Is A Laid Back Streamed News Feed, On Your Phone's Home Screen
As predicted, Facebook announced a way to turn your Android phone into one focused on people and not apps, as we’ve grown accustomed to on computers and mobile devices. “We don’t want to build a phone or operating system that only some people could use.” Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said. He went on to say that he wants to do more than build something for 1-2% of the smartphone market, since the company has over a billion users. Facebook’s “Home” product isn’t a fork of Google’s Android operating system, it’s a new launcher that brings all of the things that are happening with your friends right now to the forefront of your mobile experience. Since the home screen is the first thing you see when you wake up your phone, what we see first is “Coverfeed,” an experience that our own Josh Constine explained as a “Sixth Sense”: Coverfeed is a huge part of this experience, bringing all of your friends updates to your device, right on the home screen. “Typically all ...
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google
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mark zuckerberg
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