I realize you've been championing this idea in the thread, and I admire it because I also recognize the misdirected blame. Please understand I do not harbor "blame" for the researchers.

> Their job is to bring information to light, not to manage downstreams.

The researchers are also members of a community in which more harm than is necessary may be dealt by their actions. Nuance must exist in evaluating "reasonable" and "responsible" in the context of actions.

I strongly disagree. I want the information. I don't want to wait longer to find out about critical vulnerabilities so that researchers can fully genuflect to whatever Linux distribution norms people on message boards have. Their "actions" were to disclose a vulnerability that already existed and was putting people at risk. It's an absolute good.

If it helps you out any, even though my logic was absolutely the same and just as categorical in 2012 as it is today: there are now multiple automated projects that run every merged Linux commit through frontier models to scope them (the status quo ante of the patch) out for exploitability, and then add them to libraries of automatically-exploitable bugs.

People here are just mad that they heard about the bug. Serious attackers had this the moment it hit the kernel. This whole debate is kind of farcical. It's about a "real time" response this week to a disaster that struck a month ago.