Big day for Bug Bounty Hunters

I was quite happy to read that the Mozilla Foundation (of Firefox fame) is putting a $500 bounty on serious bugs in their software. Unlike a lot of software companies (Microsoft for instance) who try to keep security problems hidden from the general public, Mozilla is taking a much more progressive stance by making their development and bug resolution processes transparent. By doing this they ensure that all of their users are aware of security problems should they arise, and that fixes are promptly created. In contrast, many of Microsoft's security problems are kept quiet and only known about by Microsoft and malicious hackers for disturbingly long periods of time. Here is an interesting article about these two approaches. Amazingly it was published by ZDnet, a group which is usually pretty pro Microsoft, but in this article they very much support a transparent, full disclosure approach.
In other news, Doom3 comes out tomorrow. It is already floating around in certain channels. We can expect to see a serious decrease in productivity from IT people for the next few weeks. This game is HIGHLY anticipated (and pretty much guaranteed to scare you witless).