Yahoo! has quickly changed its bug bounty program after being ridiculed for handing just $US12.50 to researchers who found a nasty bug. The purple palace has now done the decent thing – pop out a blog post offering decent amounts of cash for those who help it not to crash. The author of the post is one Ramses Martinez, the …

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Thursday 3rd October 2013 04:35 GMT Charles Manning

Real cash or Y!Tat?

The 12.50 was for a voucher to spend in the Y!Store.

Will the new bounty be similarly constrained or is this going to be real folding stuff?

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1. Thursday 3rd October 2013 07:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Won't make a difference, in a few years they will do a 'Blackberry'.
  
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Thursday 3rd October 2013 06:13 GMT Charles Manning

Real cash or Y!Tat?

The 12.50 was for a voucher to spend in the Y!Store.

Will the new bounty be similarly constrained or is this going to be real folding stuff? I can't imagine what one would do with ao many Y! Tshirts.

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1. Thursday 3rd October 2013 07:04 GMT Captain DaFt
  
  Re: Real cash or Y!Tat?
  
  "I can't imagine what one would do with ao many Y! Tshirts."
  
  Well, I had an idea, but then realised that they wouldn't flush well after use.
  
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Thursday 3rd October 2013 07:17 GMT Shannon Jacobs

Well, I suppose every little bandaid helps, but...

Why doesn't Yahoo go after the spammers' business models? Well, apart from their increasingly evident incompetence, maybe it's because they just don't have enough humanpower. So why don't they let us help?

Here's the numbers. There aren't that many spammers and they are hunting for an extremely small number of fools who feed them. In contrast, there are a VAST number of people who don't like, dare I say HATE, spam. If Yahoo leveraged the big number against the small ones, then the spammers could not make money. I'm not saying they would become decent human beings, but at least they would go looking for more profitable rocks to live under.

I'm suggesting integrated spam-fighting tools that would allow us to annotate the characteristics of the spam for the most suitable countermeasures. Of course they can't let us pull the triggers (talk about your instant lynch mobs), but at least we can help aim the weapons. Yahoo obviously can't do it alone, but I really want to help go after ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help or protect ALL of the spammers' victims. (Well, maybe not quite all of the spammers' victims. I confess that there are some despicable companies that rather deserve abuse from the spammers--but that's okay. Insofar as those companies are not despicable to other people, I'm sure they'll get some help anyway and it's no skin off my nose, as they say.)

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Thursday 3rd October 2013 07:33 GMT Anonymous Coward

Bug Bounties

Will this be open to Yahoo! employees as well?

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

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Thursday 3rd October 2013 09:12 GMT Cliff

More like it

And a lot less like third prize in a colouring competition ;-)

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Thursday 3rd October 2013 10:34 GMT I ain't Spartacus

Where's the El Reg grave stone icon?

I'm cancelling my subscription immediately! The exclamation marks in the headline of this article are vertical, rather than at the correct relaxed angle.

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1. Thursday 3rd October 2013 11:43 GMT Pascal Monett
  
  Spot on, my good man. That is a scandalous lapse of journalistic integrity. It is simply not tolerable around here in any form, wot wot ?
  
  Jarvis, another cuppa, please.
  
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2. Thursday 3rd October 2013 16:25 GMT Lars
  
  Re: Where's the El Reg grave stone icon?
  
  Better not use a patented! exclamation mark.
  
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Thursday 3rd October 2013 20:55 GMT Stevie

Bah!

After the eye-bleedingly bad "upgrade" they made to Yahoo!Groups recently I'm not surprised they screwed up the bug bounty thing.

Did you catch the default banner they are using to replace the artwork Groups owners had in place?

The developer in question was in no doubt as to whether the changes were a good idea or "a load of balls".

Glad to see the mainframe/Cobol era "take something that works well and enhance it until it stops working" school of thought is alive and well thirty five years after I first encountered it as a newly minted programmer.

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