At 5:11 PM -0700 6/15/97, 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. When Collabra wanted X dollars to be acquired by Netscape, was this also "terrorism"? The term "terrorist" hardly applies in business deals.)
If it was just a business deal, that would be okay. We would have a right to not pay him. It becomes blackmail when he says "If you don't pay me, I will try to damage you." That's what he did. He said that if we didn't pay him, he'd time his press announcement to coincide with DevCon in order to cause us the maximum damage, which he did.
It's still not "terrorism." Just ordinary high-pressure bargaining, as when a film star holds out to the last minute on a deal, knowing her value increases as the deadline approaches. Or scads of similar examples, as when Netscape or Microsoft time their announcements for maximum impact. One can imagine people approaching a company with reports of a bug--as a certain math professor approached a certain chip company with reports of a strange FDIV problem--and being given the polite runaround. "Thank you for sharing. We'll have one of our QA engineers look into your report and maybe he'll get back to you." (I have no idea if Netscape reacted in this way, but I can imagine that the flow of bug reports may cause many to linger in the "In" baskets without action.) By reporting the bug to PC Magazine and CNN-FN, the "value" of the bug information shot up rather dramatically. The Arrhus team may not have gotten any bucks from Netscape--and may not even get a free "Bugs Bounty" sweatshirt--but their consulting rates and business have probably both gone up. 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. --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."