> really? so those discussions are all held amongst programmers eager to use these security vulnerabilities to illegally exploit systems? Those discussions ten

> really? so those discussions are all held amongst programmers eager to use these security vulnerabilities to illegally exploit systems? Those discussions tend to occur on different forums. Their absence here is no sign of their absence elsewhere. And for many of us, our biggest issue with Aaron Swartz is not what he did, but how he was treated. > Or are they entirely groups of programmers dedicating their careers to being very worried about the prospect that our systems might not be secure enough? Is that not an ethical position? That's a nice, positive view of security researchers. For what it's worth, it's one I hold myself. But we don't exactly hear a lot about those who skipped the whole "ethical disclosure" debate, of if their specific position is indeed ethical, and went straight to selling exploits to the NSA or criminal enterprise. > I think you're grossly underestimating the scale of crime being perpetrated by banks even very recently. Start with worldwide currency manipulation: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/opinion/banks-as-felons-or.. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/opinion/banks-as-felons-or.... Meanwhile, global botnets are common enough that we don't hear about most of them in the news - because they're not newsworthy - except for the rare occasions some security researchers manage to put a dent in one of the larger ones. And everyone gets pissed at Microsoft for mishandling no-ip.com's domains in an effort to fight malware. Not to mention the number of times I've heard of account details of services I use being compromised. Meanwhile... > More than 5% of people visiting Google sites have at least one ad injector installed. Within that group, half have at least two injectors installed and nearly one-third have at least four installed. > Thirty-four percent of Chrome extensions injecting ads were classified as outright malware. http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/03/out-with-unwanted-ad-injectors.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/03/out-with-un... The only reason Superfish was newsworthy wasn't from potentially injecting ads into your banking website... but from completely fucking up the security of your browser to the point that anyone could MitM anything.