Insecurity Sells

Here's a nice story.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2015/07/how-a-russian-hacker-made-45000-selling-a-zero-day-flash-exploit-to-hacking-team/ 

I have a lot of respect for Vitaliy Toropov. He's professional, and very good at his job. He clearly doesn't care too much for money either, because there are probably plenty of even less savoury organizations (run by much smarter people, too) who would have been happy to pay 5 times what he was asking for that exploit.

It's a pity someone so intelligent has to spend all their time fishing around the gutter to earn a living. He would be much better employed designing software production systems that solved all these kinds of problems. But there are any number of learned idiots around who will say "it's an imponderable" or that "people need the intermediate level representations". They're wrong. Computer programs can write better programs than any number of people could, no matter where they got their PhDs.