In message <9510141801.AA01730@all.net>, Dr. Frederick B. Cohen writes: [...]
The $25K is a trivial amount for finding such a hole in a product that is supposed to secure billions of dollars worth of electronic funds transfers. If the bad guys find a hole, it could easily cost millions. If you don't believe me, look at the statistics for other holes in the credit card and telecommunications businesses. They losses are in the billions each year. [...]
Note well: Netscape is offering this reward for finding bugs in *beta* release code. In other words the code that they *know* crashes, code that they susspect has security releated bugs, code that they don't think is (yet) good enough to charge a mesely $40 for! If they don't get buried in bad press for this, I would guess that they may have a diffrent program with a diffrent set reward for finding bugs in their for-sale version. Or not. After all I susspect that like most other places they are more intrested in making the next product the best in the world then making the last one "as good as the box says". Besides nobody said you have to report your bugs to Netscape just because they gave you free software and offered some sort of reward for finding bugs. If you don't think the "pay" (including the posability of having the software fixed) is high enough, don't report the bugs.