

Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system - tptacek
http://www.mercurynews.com/san-jose-neighborhoods/ci_16401891

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tptacek
He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox.
In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.

~~~
_delirium
One can only hope that the next generation will find a way to blow whistles
into cell phones to get free calls.

~~~
jeebusroxors
For those who don't know: early phone hackers (phreaks/phreakers) discovered
that a 2600hz tone would indicate a trunk was idle, reset and listen for a new
call. Since the line was not actually hung up the billing system wouldn't
activate leading to free phone calls.

Some people learned to whistle the tone, while others used bird calls, and
even a whistle given free by Captain Crunch (the cereal).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz>

~~~
catshirt
I'm actually even quite positive I remember hearing Mitnick wasn't allowed to
use the phone in prison for some time because they were concerned he could
initiate some sort of military attack by whistling into the phone.

I heard this around the age of 14 though- so it's possible my memory is foggy.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
true story: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-9995253-83.html>

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petercooper
It's amazing what the Internet has done for child geeks. Now they can find out
about, interact with, and do useful things rather than hack alone in a vacuum.

My biggest child tech achievement was finding the word C--T in a data file for
a text adventure when I was 10 (I was trying to cheat at the game). I casually
asked my parents what it meant and my parents wrote in and complained and we
got a free copy of the then-new Wing Commander by way of apology <g> (Happily,
I didn't learn what C--T meant till I was about 14..)

~~~
eru
No dictionary at home?

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patio11
Here's the advisory, with link to the bug (require login to see bug).

[http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2010/mfsa2010-65.ht...](http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2010/mfsa2010-65.html)

~~~
jleader
I have a login, but still can't see the bug. I assume I don't have sufficient
permissions on my account.

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jonah
The title makes it sound like he's on the payroll.

"12-year-old San Jose boy paid bounty for finding security hole in Firefox."

------
gruseom
Here are two pieces of evidence that this boy was fortunate in his choice of
parents:

 _Miller is quick to point out that he's not just playing games; what Alex is
doing is learning. "Clearly it's his passion," she says._

 _"But you still have to do chores," Miller reminds him when he talks of his
next debugging mission._

What a delightful story, and so free of the "genius whiz kid" trope that has
infected this genre since long before I was that age.

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jawee
Looks like a fairly default Ubuntu install in the picture. I remember playing
with Linux at that age.. fun times. He probably had a better time of it than
me struggling with Redhat 6.3 from my local bookstore though...

~~~
dekz
local bookstore? I had to find a news agent that sold it far from where I
lived, the download size would've taken weeks to finish.

~~~
code_duck
Look sonny, when I was 12 I was installing AmigaDOS from floppy disks...

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AaronMT
Wish they would open up the bug to take a peak at the comments and test cases

~~~
frisco
Protip: Firefox is open source.

~~~
AaronMT
Protip: Here's the bug I was referencing
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583077> \- it's already been
patched and fixed, so why can't I take a peak for curiosity?

------
known
Pay him more. But don't hire him. It'll spoil his instincts.

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Judson
I love the story, and I'm glad the kid got $3,000 - _but_ \- do people not
proofread their work anymore?

From the story: "[...], he plans __yo __buy Christmas gifts for his family."

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varun43in
wow, I guess it goes to show how much younger people these days are when
getting into programming. good for him :D

~~~
points
I don't think that's the case. As an 80s home computing revolution kid, quite
a lot of kids were into BASIC etc. To a certain extent we've lost that now.

We grew up in a time where you could buy a computer and you pretty much had to
learn how to program it. Now, you can get away without needing to learn.

~~~
varun43in
I agree, with technology becoming so simple to use these days, it empowers
people to do a lot more than they were able to do in the 80s. On the other
hand, I feel that as the cost of creating a company decreases, and as more
younger people learn about entrepreneurship, more of them are getting
interested in creating stuff at an early age.

------
WozRocks
I'm sorry, but I can't help but see this and think of all the kids around this
age who are prevented from earning money by child labor laws, and the idea
that this kid is a "Slave" because he's "too young to make decisions for
himself. It may sound like this is a ridiculous thing to say, but just
yesterday someone was making this claim in another forum.

I was busy writing a game at that age with the intent to sell it.
Unfortunately, at that time there were no good distribution methods for
independant games.

But I think the desire of some people who are well meaning but narrow in their
worldview to "protect" children really prevents a lot of children from
achieving as much as _they_ would like, and are capable of.

When I finally was allowed to work, I remember several years where I had to
work part time, even during the summers, because of these laws. One of my
first jobs was a programming job, and I learned a whole lot from a senior
programmer. I was 14 or 15, he was mid 20s. I wonder how much more I would
have learned if I hadn't been prevented from working as much as I wanted
because of state mandated limits on the number of hours. I can recall many
times when he was explaining something to me, and it was getting really good,
but I had to leave.

~~~
tptacek
Did I miss the part of the article where they took his $3,000 check away?

~~~
WozRocks
No, but most people from both political parties support the laws that prevent
people from hiring kids his age. I think he was only able to get the $3,000
because it was a bounty or a "Contest", and not a "job" or "employment".

I think bug bounties shouldn't be the only way this kid is allowed to earn
money. He's proven himself to have discipline and some responsibility. He
should be allowed to go work for a startup, if he wants (at least during the
summers when he's off from school, anyway.)

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revoltingx
Good for him! If he keeps this up, he's going to be an awesome programmer.

~~~
tptacek
That or he'll ruin the whole Internet and then do a dissertation on stochastic
congestion control.

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eogas
Why oh why couldn't I have been brought up in a white, suburban, upper-middle
class family with my own computer and a highspeed internet connection.

Stories like this always make me bitter, but good on the kid for making the
most of his upbringing.

~~~
mahmud
WTH?

MOD consisted mainly of poor Brooklyn kids; in fact, some of them were members
of street gangs, and taught themselves to hack on school computers. From
nowhere to the cover of magazines ..

The wikipedia article sucks, but the lore is out there and well known:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Deception>

~~~
nkassis
Thanks! Now I get what the hell Hackers (the crappy 1995 movie) was trying to
portray albeit really badly.

~~~
xentronium
OT: Funny how perceptions differs. I liked the movie for its entertainment
value, even though it was naive and used cliches about hackers.

