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posted by takyon on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:46AM   Printer-friendly

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday August 13 2015, @10:05PM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday August 13 2015, @10:05PM (#222550) Homepage Journal

    I'd bet money it gets upheld in the United States. Strictly speaking, FOSS licenses could be considered a type of EULA that define what you can and can't do with the software. What a EULA though can't do is make you give up rights granted to you. Reverse engineering is still legal in the United States, as long as you're not actively reverse engineering a copy protection scheme. Chinese wall-style reverse engineering has been upheld in court, as has blackbox reverse engineering (specifically, PC BIOS for the former, Samba, and WINE for the later), and in general reverse engineering is still considered fair use.

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