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by guardiangod 1470 days ago
(Will read the paper later)

How lawyer-y do you think Bandai Namco will be?

3 comments

They probably won't care about this, although I do find it weird when researchers make a whole website with custom domain just to publish something like this. Personally, it comes off as less trustworthy since it enters the same realm of bullshit as those market manipulation attacks on AMD a few years back[1]

Not saying that's what this is (I'm sure these are legitimate findings), but this tactic raises some red flags for me.

1: https://www.gamersnexus.net/industry/3260-assassination-atte...

Yeah I hate this trend of naming vulnerabilities and pandering to the tech press. The CTS Labs FUD was just beyond the pale. Most tech journalism just ate up those claims that were clearly B.S. and not even self consistent. They were claiming it was impossible for AMD to patch with firmware or microcode but in the same sentence claiming an attacker could use it to create a rootkit that couldn't be removed. Nobody bothered taking two seconds to think critically about what they were publishing to realize they were claiming that it was, in essence, somehow possible for an attacker to "pull up the ladder behind them" but not for AMD.

Maybe this "unpatchable flaw" with the M1 has some more legitimacy than the "critical AMD vulnerabilities" back in 2018, but please, stop with the stupid trendy names for vulnerabilities. Lets discuss this on the technical merits and skip the marketing.

>Yeah I hate this trend of naming vulnerabilities and pandering to the tech press.

It is not a trend. It's a tradition:

Back Orifice. Ping of Death. Smurf Attack. Computer Viruses. Computer Worms. (Hello Robert Morris!)

Actively marketing yourself and your ideas is one of the most important things you can do. Without, most people simply won’t know about it or will dismiss it. Just because you market it, doesn’t mean it’ll be successful - things still have to prove their worth regardless and will otherwise fizzle out.

How many important security vulnerabilities have just had technical white papers and no marketing have gotten wider coverage? Very, very few. It’s also very useful for humans to talk about something when given a short, memorable name.

Heartbleed bug was a great name for this purpose, for motivating more towards fixing it.
If they are - Joseph and MIT, please stand up to them. The standard for infringement is confusing similarity. Researchers aren't marketing goods and there's no risk of confusion.
Would have thought Arch Linux would have more of a case for their package manager (Pacman) seeing as now it could be confused with an exploit.