Oracle's Chief Security Officer, Mary Ann Davidson, took to her blog to demand that users stop hunting for bugs in Oracle's software, because, among other things, it violates the user license.
The blog entry got deleted quickly, but is archived here:
Now is a good time to reiterate that I'm not beating people up over this merely because of the license agreement. More like, "I do not need you to analyze the code since we already do that, it's our job to do that, we are pretty good at it, we can – unlike a third party or a tool – actually analyze the code to determine what's happening and at any rate most of these tools have a close to 100% false positive rate so please do not waste our time on reporting little green men in our code." I am not running away from our responsibilities to customers, merely trying to avoid a painful, annoying, and mutually-time wasting exercise.
Please, Oracle users, don't worry your little heads - just stop violating the license agreement.
takyon: #oraclefanfic on Twitter
And an update from Ars:
Oracle Executive Vice President and Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven made a statement distributed by e-mail to the press on the post:
The security of our products and services has always been critically important to Oracle. Oracle has a robust program of product security assurance and works with third party researchers and customers to jointly ensure that applications built with Oracle technology are secure. We removed the post as it does not reflect our beliefs or our relationship with our customers.
Just how Oracle's chief security officer fell out of alignment with Oracle's core beliefs and managed to spread her heretic thoughts on customers was not addressed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:02PM
No it has nothing to do with paygrade. It has to do with difficulty and training. Making secure code is hard and unintuitive. You must be trained to do it. Programmers, like all engineers, spend nearly their entire thinking time trying to get something to work as intended. To get to know how an active adversary will break your work requires thinking entirely different and adopting a secure software development lifecycle. That is tough even for the people that specialize in it. You have to be trained in that stuff because it is wholly unnatural. Think a bachelor's specialization level of work just to get the basics down. We need more developers (all developers really) to go through that process but few are willing to spend a year or two racking up an extra 40 college credits.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday August 14 2015, @01:44AM
Why should they spend a year or two racking up 40 credits? Is the employer willing to pony up the time and money for these people to spend 2 years not working? If not, they have no right to complain. Why would anyone bother doing this when they can just get a CS or CpE degree like everyone else and immediately go to work making nearly 6 figures? Are they going to get 50% more pay for this extra training? Of course not.
As usual, it all comes down to employers being cheap bastards and refusing to invest in their employees.