Tom Weinstein wrote:
Tim May wrote:
Tom Weinstein wrote:
Tim May wrote:
(What the Danes offered was a straight buiness deal, albeit made weirder and more frantic by the constraints of time, publicity, and worldwide attention. Still a business deal, though.)
what he said was something like: "Pay me lots of money or I will go to the press in such a way as to damage you the most."
That is blackmail. It's clear that the money is to prevent the damage, not just for the information.
This happens every day in major-league business ballparks. Information --> is power is --> money. Usually the word "blackmail" surfaces when one company takes a shit-kicking from the other company. Methinks the reason the word "blackmail" so easily springs to the lips of Netscape exec's is that they know they got caught with their pants down. They designed their code so that they or John Law could put their dicks in our hard drives and wiggle them around and now they are accusing the guy who has "pictures" of their guilt of doing something dirty. Although Netscape is claiming the "high ground" by saying they don't pay "blackmail," I think it is much more likely that they didn't need to *pay* for the information because they already *knew* exactly what the other company had discovered. Netscape calls their upcoming patch a "bug fix" when, in reality, it is the disabling of a "secret feature." Thus I wouldn't be too quick to accept their definition of "blackmail."
Browsers are big business, and high stakes poker. It's not surprising to me to see this kind of bluffing and "terorrism" (to quote Homer, with his rosy-fingered typing). What's surprising is that it hasn't happened more often, or at least hasn't gotten as much publicity.
It probably doesn't get reported very often because a company usually doesn't have foreknowledge of the problem (i.e. it is a genuine "bug" in their product) and thus it is in their best interest to pay to find out the specifics of the problem. When you're innocent of wrongdoing, it's called a business negotiation. When you're guilty of wrongdoing, its called blackmail? So if Tom Weinstein calls it blackmail, then I guess that pretty much indicates Netscape's position in regard to their browser's ability to be used to compromise the user's privacy and security. TruthMonger