Further, helping people is not only good marketing, it’s also helping. :) Laughing at them being “dumb” or being “fooled by” Company-XXXX does not help at all, it makes them defensive at best, depressed regularly, and untrustful of technology in general at worst.

I agree with our first point, but not your second.

Many people have all kinds of security problems with windows. I used to work at a computer repair shop and most of what I did was reload windows because people collected so many viruses/spyware/malware that it couldn’t be removed. Anti-virus/spyware programs aren’t the issue, the issue is that security has been an afterthought for windows. My understanding is that may have changed with Vista, but I don’t really believe it.

When my friends have problems with windows security I offer Ubuntu because there are no wild Ubuntu viruses or malware.

I agree that laughing at Vista’s failure isn’t helpful but presenting the fact that at this year’s competition the security researchers were able to defeat Vista and Mac but not Ubuntu is very useful.

Hackers do experiment by nature, but generally don’t break things. I do know RMS broke into professors’ rooms in his university to gain internet access. I also understand that this competition itself is not malicious.

There are two points I’m trying to make in that post.

1) The use of “hacker” in the sense that the mass media uses it. This is very bad. “20 000 bank accounts hacked” and so on. This degrades the general public’s understanding about hackers and hacking.

2) The poor quality of marketing based on “our product sucks less than the other guy’s”. There is no excuse for this AFAIK.

I guess I should have written a more thorough post in the first place.