> For the record The Register contacted us for information regarding > this issue. I did mention the Dev list and I assume this is the > source where the reporter got his information from. As a (rather technical) journalist myself, I would suggest a simple way of cooperating with my colleagues of non-specialized press. Ask them to mail or fax to you their article before it is published. Tell them it's established policy of your group/enterprise/whatever to do this for any public news release. Obviously for the colleagues of the daily newspapers this means that YOU should be able to call back and give your corrections within 1-2 hours from receiving the article. But - I can assure this - they will be grateful if you suggest clearer and simpler ways of saying more correct things. Another point you may want to consider is that we as technicians are prone to the subtleties of any problem, e.g. we wish to know why something doesn't work and how to exploit that. Public, and non-specialized press, wish to know two things: which amount of maximum damage could come from an exploit/vuln, and how do they protect themselves. Should I do an example ? This could be a good quote for a press article on the vulnerability recently pointed out by G. Guninski (for MS it's MS01-038): ----- "This vulnerability is present in any installazion of Outlook XP" says computer security expert <YOUR NAME HERE> "Using this vulnerability an hacker could execute easily any program on a target computer, and could completely control the machine. You can protect yourself by downloading a patch from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms01-038.asp " ----- Be clear, be fast, be simple, and don't add too much information. Otherwise they could have to "rewrite" your sentence. And THAT could be a real problem. Stefano Zanero ComputerWorld Italia (www.cwi.it)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Jul 16 2001 - 10:00:32 PDT