Tell HN: I unknowingly broke the PHP RCE embargo. I am sorry.
I posted here about the then-upcoming PHP RCEs related to CVE-2026-109618 & CVE-2026-109619. I appreciate this has had considerable knock-on effects with the schedule for co-ordinated disclosure, and created additional workload.
I am truly sorry. I take full responsibility for my actions.
It was not remotely my intention to cause any of the subsequent side effects.
At the time of posting, I didn't know about any embargo. My contact had told me there was no embargo, and her contact had told her the same thing.
As someone who follows the 4-weekly PHP release cycle and compiles it from source, my intention was to alert others in a similar position to be aware of the importance/urgency of the updates.
That clearly backfired in a pretty wild fashion. I have learned my lesson.
> At the time of posting, I didn't know about any embargo. My contact had told me there was no embargo, and her contact had told her the same thing.
If you're not a party to an embargo, and no one told you an embargo even exists... you should not follow the embargo. In fact, you should maybe even consider leaking basic details or challenging the embargo if you are in this situation. In your situation, they had lost information asymmetry before the news got to you. I don't know where people got the idea that unrelated third parties have to follow embargos.
Embargos are not about keeping secrets, they are about the game theory of coordinated disclosure.
Well, this is an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.
if you received the information about the RCEs without the information about the embargo, then you did not break the embargo. someone else up the chain did.
this whole saga will be analyzed and we'll all come out better for it at the end.
I hope this is bait because that's not how it works.
you cannot be subject to an embargo of which you had no knowledge and took no participation in.
the embargo was already broken when pete received the information.
This is exactly how it works. People who are part of the embargo are responsible for making sure that anyone they share information with -- which should usually be nobody! -- are aware of and abide by the embargo.
So if I read the post here and told someone, would I be breaking the embargo?
No, you didn't. I misread.
This is not a situation where "Ignorantia juris non excusat" applies.
I'm trying to follow but how could one possibly know information (the embargo) that has not been shared?
For the law, you can say that the law has been published and is at least available for review.
that's my point. Someone cannot come at you saying you were still under the rules of the embargo if you had no idea the embargo existed so now you're in violation and get to suffer the consequences. You cannot say that about the law.
Okay, my bad. I didn't know he was not participating in the embargo.
Yes, it is.
There is no way he didn't recognize the severity and massive impact of the vulnerabilities, go and try to find the CVE, fail to do so, think nothing of not being able to find it, and post.
We're also supposed to believe he didn't wonder why nobody else in his social media circles, lists, and forums were talking about it? He says he did what he did because he wanted to let people know.
We're supposed to believe he didn't stop and think "gosh, why is it falling to me to let people know about this?" It was mainstream media news less than 12 hours after it was announced.
By now I've seen at least 5 different people or companies blamed for leaks or releasing fixes early.
If anyone is at fault here, I'm looking at the PHP maintainers.
The embargo apparently held for like two months, during which they have not managed to release patches.
> If anyone is at fault here, I'm looking at the PHP maintainers.
There's a reason the moniker PHP was "pretty horrible programming".
And well, things haven't changed in that regard.
If you're seriously asking whether or not it's possible that someone was overconfident and thoughtless rather than malicious and calculating... yeah I find that very easy to believe. Process safety exists because as individuals and as groups we suck at this.
It’s even an HN community guideline ironically, assume good faith.
Doesn't the embargo end when the CVE is published? I thought that's the whole point in CVE allocate != CVE publish.
No, CVEs can be allocated before a vulnerability has even been found!
No, a CVE being assigned or allocated can happen well in advance. It's just requesting an identifier and it can be reserved very early.
For example: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-50000
That’s kind of you, Pete, but it was leaked and being exploited well prior to your previous posting here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/amazon-threat-intellig...
No leak claimed there.
Don't be silly, you can't possibly be responsible for breaking an embargo you weren't subject to or informed about.
That's fair. For clarity: I take responsibility for posting on HN, without knowing the facts.
Not sure what you are apologizing for. It's a severely overblown bug that ended up on the front page of New York Times and the Japan Prime Minister had to get involved too. The bug itself is non trivial to exploit from just public requests to a web server so I am not sure what the hysteria is about. It's no different from the other hundred or so CVEs I see being posted or dropped everyday.
It will be headlines on Hacker News regardless due to sheer sensationalism, I think most DevSecOps people would rather find out the news here first than via their boss calling them after reading the morning news.
The Japanese PM did not “have” to get involved.
Well, consider that their old IT minister has never used a computer in his life, it's probably a good thing she's the one issuing the call to update.
You've used a computer the moment you aren't even born yet.
Okay, now I'm curious about what sci-fi trope you've gone too far down a rabbit hole in.
must be proof we're in a simulation!
"The sonogram or EKG machine is a computer, so the baby used a computer, checkmate!"
Having a compute device used on you is not the same as using a compute device. QED
Well the old definition of computer was women with abacuses so I guess you could stretch that.
What does "non trivial to exploit from just public requests" mean? It's known to be exploitable on more than one stock PHP application. This really is a 5-alarm fire.
I think people are just latching onto the post that hit the front page earlier today about it being non-trivial to exploit, combined with the fact that there seem to be about a billion PoC out there, most of which don't work.
The most direct exploit requires a compromised supply chain which ranks it about as dangerous as your usual dependency exploits.
I think this is just false? Are we playing some kind of weird game of telephone? Is the term "direct exploit" doing way more work in that sentence than you mean it to?
The alternative route through the web forms requires the absence of ASLR. So you need to spam the endpoint, like a lot. You can probably mitigate at the edge (CDNs) or perhaps at the reverse proxy level (NGINX) through e.g. rate limiting. More of a web version of row hammer then some sort of trivial SQL injection attack that works consistently.
Maybe a LAMP stack on an extremely ancient version of Linux is vulnerable out of the box. Quit the fear mongering please, you do the security community no favors.
Say what you will about OpenAI, Wiz etc but if OpenAI, Wiz, Cloudflare, the PHP Foundation and pretty much every CERT out there together recommend to take down PHP apps and patch immediately then I'm very much inclined to follow that advice.
Due to the insane media coverage there'll of course be a deluge of PoCs, most of which won't work. But constantly refreshing Twitter to see whether there's a working PoC is not a good use of time nor a great security strategy.
Right, that's what's worrying me. It is not interesting that the most widely circulated public POC/demos don't work. All you should care about is the (currently) non-public POCs that do work, of which there are apparently several.
My PoC (generated) was able to exploit an index.php with a simple echo.
The only thing you have to know in advance is the relative memory offset distances, and that's it. Memory feng shui was the longest part of the implementation.
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/actual-php2shell
Try finding a modern Linux distro without ASLR enabled defaults.
Did you even read the diff, it synthesized intentionally vulnerable code which trivializes the exploitability
Responsibility may include vetting your sources - is this person competent and dutiful, to actually know there's no embargo? - and researching the situation, and thinking several moves ahead, and other stuff.
Reality is that everyone has to make decisions in finite time, using the resources they actually have.
And I'd put a whole lot more responsibility further up that chain of contacts. And question how many other people they might have blabbered to.
>And question how many other people they might have blabbered to.
100%. I'm concerned about the two-way street this might also have opened me up to with information I shared privately with this individual. Nothing significant or incriminating, but the professional relationship is concluded.
What does “take full responsibility” mean in the present context? Are you forfeiting all your assets and pledging the next twenty generations of your descendants into peonage?
(For clarity, I’m being facetious, but it’s a really meaningless and empty phrase to commit to the written record.)
>What does “take full responsibility” mean in the present context?
I posted something that -- in hindsight -- I shouldn't have, and it had repercussions for a lot of people. An action that I took had considerable knock-in effects around the world.
Some outlets are reporting that my action of posting something that I believed to be in good faith was an indicator or catalyst for the embargo to be tossed out and a previously-agreed schedule to change in short order.
That's not a normal Wednesday for me. Not even vaguely. I've not slept well since, and my taking ownership with an apology is this new course of action. Hopefully I'll sleep tonight.
re: assets and peonage – I am but a broke & wizened nerd with no known descendants. If you're ever in Cornwall, UK: look me up, I'll gladly buy you a sleep-friendly beverage. And I’m not being facetious.
Shit happens.
Years ago I lost $250K at work, well gave away, so real money out the door. I figured out why we were bleeding, that the mistake was mine (2008 vs 2009 in a function) and then changed the pattern to use explicit names rather than numbered events.
I figured at the end of the day I was fired. My boss laughed at me and told me good job for owning my mistake, fixing it, and then making sure it could not happen again.
Honestly don't just apologize - tell the whole story, in full. Tell us what you should have done differently at each step. Tell us where the process failed you and us. Those sorts of narratives and suggestions are how processes get improved. There is a humble and informative post mortem that you can write up and publish (beyond HN) for everyone's edification. But that should honestly be a Monday thing, when you have a clear head and some more perspective on the whole situation.
Honestly though, dont beat yourself up over this.
Yep, everyone makes mistakes. It's the learning-from-it part that's really important.
>I figured at the end of the day I was fired. My boss laughed at me and told me good job for owning my mistake, fixing it, and then making sure it could not happen again.
i forget the origin of the story, but i loosely remember a story about a boss and employee in a similar situation. the important bit was the bosses line ($ adjusted to match your story):
"why would i fire you when i just spent $250k training you"
You may be thinking of Dale Carnegie's classic story:
> Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain—and most fools do.
> But it takes character and self-control to understand and forgive.
> “A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by the way he treats little men.”
> Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent performer at air shows, was returning to his home in Los Angeles from a show in San Diego. As described in the magazine Flight Operations, at three hundred feet in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft maneuvering he managed to land the plane. It was badly damaged, but fortunately neither he nor his two passengers were hurt.
> Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to inspect the airplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the World War II propeller plane he had been flying had been loaded with jet fuel rather than gasoline.
> Upon returning to the airport, Hoover asked to see the mechanic who had serviced his airplane. The young man was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused the loss of three lives, as well.
> You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate the tongue-lashing that this proud and precise pilot was about to unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn’t scold the mechanic; he didn’t even criticize him. Instead, he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder and said, “To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this again, I want you to service my F51 tomorrow.”
i have a feeling it was an IBM story/legend, but my memory isn't what it used to be.
however, it's much the same in spirit as the one you posted, thanks!
Whether the story is true I can't say, but you're right about IBM. From Chip & Dan Heath's book Switch[0], page 173:
> In the 1960s, an executive at IBM made a decision that ended up losing the company $10 million (about $70 million in 2009 dollars). The CEO of IBM, Tom Watson, summoned the offending executive to his office at corporate headquarters. The journalist Paul B. Carroll described what happened next:
[0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Switch/ad5ktG0oe00C?hl=...
that's the one, thanks for digging it up!
It's used in "How to win friends and influence people" if I recall correctly. A great book that everyone should read, just a shame about the title.
I've been meaning to reread it for a while.
I might be in Cornwall in a bit, so I might take you up on that :)
But yeah, it happens. I could share some stories of me (being responsible for) bricking multiple ~200k circuit boards in a row, if that makes it better. In the end nobody really cared and the world kept on turning. Good decisions might come from experience, but experience comes from bad decisions. It's how it is.
Relax. You did no wrong. You reacted to the information that was ‘local’ to you. I am merely objecting (hopefully humorously) to the phrase “take full responsibility “: it is uncalled-for, unnecessary, and vacuous. Try to have a good Thursday. Tuesday was not your fault.
Oh and I’m from Bristol. We might have more in common than you’d expect.
The takeaway shouldn’t have been “don’t post” (mainly because someone else would have) but instead “news reporting is hellaciously inaccurate”.
> What does “take full responsibility” mean in the present context?
Aside from Pete's reply (see adjacent comment), I'd add that him taking full responsibility is also his way of saying his post was nobody else's fault but his.
In other words it's less about forfeiting assets and descendant peonage, and more about saying "the buck stops with me".
At least that's my read of his sentiment. Pete can expand if need be.
I know nothing of who Pete is or his associations, so any accuracy on the following speculation is purely coincidental.
"Take full responsibility" is also something someone set up as a scapegoat might say. By claiming nobody else influenced, coerced, or otherwise convinced them to make that statement, every/any one else involved can then wash their hands of the situation.
I'm merely playing devil's advocate here, and it's just a sign of the times that a person making an honest admission can be interpreted in such a manner.
[Devil's advocate noted.]
I'm not a scapegoat. Aside from a few brusque messages and a few people from my past finding me on LinkedIn, I've heard nothing from anyone.
I've seen my HN username mentioned on various outlets, and That Post© has been linked from a Wikipedia article, so I can chalk this up to experience. My fear (?) is that HN would get a reputational clobbering from me 'leaking', but given the other moving parts in this whole event I probably shouldn't be too concerned.
It's been a while since I've been involved in an international event, I'm a bit rusty on it!
To be honest, your accounting of the situation reminds me of a scene from the West Wing where the press secretary lets slip info about a grand jury but then spins herself up realizing grand juries are meant to be secret and leaking that info could have consequences. After an entire episode of a tv show where she's not been able to sleep, she finds out that because someone else told her about the information, she's not liable for leaking it. Hopefully, you'll similarly be able to get some sleep now that you know the world isn't going to come crashing down on you.
You did as good as you could with the information available to you. You don’t need to “take full responsibility”.
>At least that's my read of his sentiment. Pete can expand if need be.
That's about it.
“Nobody else’s fault but mine” is a perfectly good way of asserting “nobody else’s fault but mine”; “I take full responsibility” is something else entirely and the two are not synonymous. Hyperbole needs to be radically discounted.
Would "I take sole responsibility" work better for you?
No. He is not solely responsible. A sequence of bugs introduced by developers created a hole. Information about how to deal with this calamity was not privy to him. He is not “solely responsible”. He merely reacted (publicly) to information that he was not beholden to maintain secret about things others had done inadvertently in the past. He’s not alone. He does not bear that “sole responsibility”. He acted within the UK’s freedom of speech doctrine (IANAL). He need not place this burden upon himself.
Taking responsibility for a mistake is neither meaningless nor empty, but honorable. The very essence of humanity.
It's words vs. action, and I couldn't care less about anyone's words.
And honor is in the action, dishonor in the words.
It is honourable but it is also linguistic abuse that drains the phrase of its full semantic meaning. “Take full responsibility” must remain a stricture of the highest regard. He is not fully responsible nor should he be held to be nor should we demand that he be and most importantly we must not dilute that phrase of its full semantic import, or else we shall have to come up with another one once this one is devalued to mean essentially nothing beyond “I fucked up in good faith and with a lack of information that was concealed for me for decisions taken by others in good faith way upstream of myself”.
It does NOT mean "He agrees to settle any financial claims against himself or his employer, for damages caused by negligence".
Could have said "I blame only myself for this mistake, nothing else needs to change".
This will keep happening until the system where this can happen runs out of willing scapegoats.
What does “I take full responsibility” mean if not (amongst other things) “I accept it is my duty to pay reparations”? As you yourself rephrase it “he could have said ‘I blame only myself for this mistake, nothing else has to change’”. That would have been sufficient and beyond necessary. “I accept full responsibility” is corporate-speak empty hyperbole, and it has to end. Is he any more responsible than those who introduced the hole in the first place? No. Is he responsible for not adhering to agreements he was not privy to? No. He cannot “take full responsibility” because that is an utterly unreasonable burden to place upon him, a lone well-meaning actor who unbeknownst to him took a misstep. We need to discount this corporate-speak linguistic hyperbole.
Exactly, full responsibility implies paying for damages.
Correct, otherwise we need another phrase for when he would pay for damages, like "the fullest responsibility" or "the absolutely utmost responsibility".
You're ignoring and severely underestimating social responsibility and social consequences.
A good-faith judgement was made within a broader context that was unknown to him. What are we expected to demand, hanging on electrified barbed wire?? He acted in good faith, he’s not the architect of a global cataclysm.
I don’t know if embargoes have much effect anymore. They used AI to find this issue, meaning anyone else could also find the issue with time and the right model. The clock is always ticking after a CVE but now it ticks faster. I am certain that companies like Cellebrite are pointing a bunch of models at popular repos and filing away all the exploits they find in a database.
The first rule of the fight club only applies if you know about the fight club.
What is the fight club?
the coordinated disclosure
It's a quote from a 1999 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club
The second rule of fight club is DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB.
We don't talk about The Fight Club.
what about the second rule of fight club?
I also got that information before your post. I believe an embargo is impossible to keep up when it takes way too long to get a fix out.
Don't feel too bad. Just knowing a "10.0" RCE CVE is inbound w/o extra details doesn't get you very far. The actions of calif.io and Chainguard after your post was what caused the damage.
> Just knowing a "10.0" RCE CVE is inbound w/o extra details doesn't get you very far
Well that's exactly what chainguard claims though. "Find bad bugs in PHP" is the prompt they claim they used to rediscover the issue
Thanks Pete. I appreciate you taking the time to post here.
I really hope this isn’t chewing at you and that you’re just trying to do what you feel is the right thing by posting this.
Hope you're doing alright mate. Seems like an honest attempt to do the right thing to me. Get some sleep.
This does feel like the fix took so long to bake and was so obvious way too many people who are into PHP knew about it, I knew about eMudra's cert issue as soon as Chrome and Firefox pushed updates to disallow them for instance because of reasons, and it wasn't even fixed after it was all made public on several platforms, I think Apple still hasn't fixed it properly, the trust Store is still fucked not sure if Safari was separately patched, maybe there is an os update in the last few hours I missed.
This entire RCE race is always annoying.
are you the guy working at Chainguard publishing images...?
Nope. No connection or affiliation with Chainguard at all:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50183326
Hah, I was trying to find this comment you made. There's confusingly also "Calif" in the mix (possibly closer to your string of people, but not your affiliation either). I wonder if, perhaps, it was easier to point to your HN post for bleepingcomputer, than what Chainguard did (you only expressed something was coming). It's all slightly immaterial since exploit attempts started 3-4 days.
No connection or affiliation to any of the organisations involved. I am a self-employed consultant for my day job, and a solo founder of a mental health non-profit on the side.
It was a good thing. It started useful conversations and taught valuable lessons that we probably wouldn't have faced with a more "traditional" vuln disclosure/patch process. We're going to see this a whole lot more with AI, probably as 0-days. It's better that we got the fire drill out of the way now.
Yeah, I actually first heard it here from you.
Related (where you already posted a bit of this):
Today's PHP security release, and how we're strengthening security
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182987
It's ok. It's just php.
It's okay. It's just 70% of websites.
You're a good person with good intentions. Hope you get some rest sir.
The security field is full of a bunch of self important jagoffs that think they are “super smart”. Its all a joke and its sad that anyone feels they need to play these stupid games.
Security is important but the people in the security field are clowns and it seems it has gotten worse over the last 20 years.
So.. what has the effect of this all been? I understand that the early release of POC exploits increased the pressure for mitigations in advance of the patch release and caused a lot of work and stress. I have read the tweets from Cloudflare with statistics for malformed requests related to suspected exploit attempts.
I know breaches are often kept under wraps, and there's a long tail. But is there any evidence of impact at this point? Were any sites compromised that we know about? There was a lot of hullabaloo, with foreign and domestic LE agencies recommending sites be taken offline (holy shit!).
Was this like Y2K where, based on the coordinated action of many, a real issue was addressed in time? Or is it like Hale Bopp where everybody watched, and a few casualties in the preparation, but ultimately a nothingburger?
Flame on!
Can someone, with the benefit of hindsight, explain the embargo ? Why isn't there a clause "if the vuln leaks, embargo is broken" . I still don't understand the fuss.
Everyone knew about the vuln well before the patches going live. The embargo, at that point, made things worse.
In plain english, please.
The idea is that nobody has chance to have prior knowledge to identify or research the bug until it is generally possible to apply the fix immediately. If someone leaks the patch beforehand, others can inspect the bug and start exploiting it in the wild, while others have no chance to apply the patch.
Whether someone just leaked the CVE numbers or just ”there is a big bug in PHP” - that should not be enought to accelerate finding that bug. But other information that pins the bug for specific property or feature makes it easier to find and race against patching starts.
And at that point you don’t really know if someone really found it or not, since only few big organisations can collect that much data to detect successful exploiting. And most ”PoC”:s in the wild were credible-looking but vibecoded mess that did nothing what sources claimed.
Until there is absolute evidence that exploitation happens in the wild, succesfully, you don’t leak the patch or bug details beforehand.
In this case, the area where the bug is in PHP, leaked partially, but apparently there was no enough evidence that it was exploited succesfully or if any of the PoCs in the wild actually worked properly. So patch or related detailed information was not released before the initial schedule.
Your later insights about the vuln POCs being a scam helped me better understand the situation.
I could see the value of the embargo in the old world of “6 uber security firms and a few bounty hunters” but the new world of pointing AI at the PHP source just seems flimsy.
> And most ”PoC”:s in the wild were credible-looking but vibecoded mess that did nothing what sources claimed.
Could this be a variant of the survivorship bias? Maybe only the low quality PoCs ended up in the honeypots while the more capable actors avoided them.
It happens. Information cascades are messy, especially with multi-layered contacts
Thanks for owning it ,the best thing now is ensuring the patch details are clear once the official release drops. Moving forward is what matters
You’re setting a great example of how to be open and take responsibility, even when you’re not actually at fault. I really respect how you’ve handled this. You’ve also given the community a valuable reminder that some security disclosures may be under embargo, and that it’s worth having in mind before sharing.
x
The modern version:
You have sinned.
Your penance:
Three Hail Claude's, one Our GPT and an act of loop engineering.
Two minutes of silent prompting.
and 1 hour, writing code, no AI.
That's a bit harsh.
What joy. Not much of a punishment.
In the name of The Large Language Model, The Harness and The Tokens!
Amen
> I take full responsibility for my actions.
I would like this to materialize, but that's just empty words.
> It was not remotely my intention to cause any of the subsequent side effects.
What were your intentions, then?
> my intention was to alert others in a similar position to be aware of the importance/urgency of the updates.
Have you lived under the stone for the past few years with respect to cybersecurity? Yes you have. All of you ignore security as in "it doesn't apply to me", "they won't break into my software because I'm truly the best 10x developer in the world" etc.
> I have learned my lesson.
I certainly doubt that. A person with IQ only a tiny bit bigger than Trump's wouldn't seek public attention so badly to disclose a security hole in a public forum.
When such praise-seeking habits have stopped being embarrassing?
Really hope you are not in the US. This kind of admission would be used against you in a civil trial, and lawyers love to sue for just about any reason under the sun. Someone could drag you to court and you might be able to defend yourself, but at an extremely painful cost both financially and emotionally. While I think that would be utter bullshit, that does seem to be the way this country operates now.
I am not in the US.
The parent is getting downvoted but he is absolutely right. Do not ever do what you just did. It makes you an easy target for a frivolous lawsuit in the US or in other countries because of the potential liabilities in your message, they are real. Even if you didn't do anything wrong, you are painting a target on your back, for no reason. I would ask HN to delete that thread directly.
You cannot foresee the financial/civil consequences of that RCE and some people might be looking for scapegoats in the future.
There's at least some evidence in the other direction.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/10/in-patient-in...
> New research shows that discussing hospital errors with patients leads to better patient safety without spurring a barrage of malpractice claims.
It has nothing to do with anything I said.
Sure it does. Saying sorry sometimes reduces liability risk, which is quite counterintuitive at first.
> Sure it does. Saying sorry sometimes reduces liability risk, which is quite counterintuitive at first.
No it doesn't have anything to do with what I said. The OP has no contractual or legal obligations toward any community, unlike a doctor and their patients in case of medical error.
edit:
> A doctor has no contractual obligation to apologize, either.
> But it can help prevent things from going to lawsuits, versus the "fuck you I admit nothing" approach that sometimes just pisses people off.
OP isn't a doctor as far as you know, and isn't apologizing to a specific person. OP can't be bound to an embargo he didn't know about and wasn't involved in any decisions.
You're completely off topic and you just want the last word.
Your ramblings have nothing to do with anything I have said.
A doctor has no contractual obligation to apologize, either.
But it can help prevent things from going to lawsuits, versus the "fuck you I admit nothing" approach that sometimes just pisses people off.
Anyone can sue anyone else for any reason. We should encourage honesty and transparency, not discourage it.
While possibly true in theory, in practice it's not. Courts and judges do not take kindly to frivolous or unsubstantiated claims, and any halfway good attorney would advise you to not waste your money and your time on a claim you are unlikely to win or be able to collect on.
People and companies do get sued with the full intention of a settlement and it never going to trial. But that only happens when the defendant has deep pockets or good insurance.
This isn't a matter of transparency, was the OP legally bound not to disclose the RCE? That whole "embargo" was pure courtesy between the people involved. The OP committed no fault at first place and the exploit was already in the wild anyway. Whoever really wanted to exploit it before the patch could without using the OP as a source.
> Anyone can sue anyone else for any reason.
And it's easier to have cause to sue when someone publish an "admission of guilt", which makes a lawsuit harder to dismiss thus costlier.
That should be no problem: he posted exactly *because* he meant to take full responsibility for his actions.
This is definitionally humble bragging. First of all the apology is in bad faith because there is nothing to apologize for. We are all giving the discovered CVEs attention (the brag component) under the guise of an apology (the humble component). I am being downvoted by well meaning, people pleasers that don't mind if they waste our time and attention doing it. Sounds great.
HN is just reddit light now. No meaningful conversation happens here and as such you should treat it that way now. I only post triggering bad faith arguments like the rest of the losers on this site
So who will be sued and/or state prosecuted?