No - you are missing the point. I am not preaching security through obscurity. What I am saying though, is that if a security hole is discovered, obscurity, not open-ness is the right course of action until the problem is fixed. To expose a security hole as soon as it is identified is foolish.

I don't subscribe to the general /. view that exposure of problems is a good thing - if only to force the hand of the person who should be fixing things. And as you can tell from my uid, I've been around on /. for a while. Lives can be ruined / terminated by this course of action, and only the naive can fool themselves into thinking that such actions are always moral or justified.

You are missing the point. Its not that Mo-99 is produced in Canada, but that its production requires weapons grade uranium, and that its produced in civillian facilities that is the salient piece of information. The combination of those two pieces are not widely known. Or rather, was not widely known.

Most likely true. But this isn't a justification for leaking the list. There is immense value in a consolidated list of security vulnerabilities because the effort and expertiese needed to build this list (which is not inconsiderable) no longer needs to be spent by a terrorist. In an organization that breeds suicide bombers, the people who can build such a list are a going to be a rarity. And even if there are one or two people like this in the organization, they are very unlikely to have the wide range of knowledge that could produce the entirety of such a list. Not to mention that going through such a list, and examining the reasons why an item on the list is a part of it, can help identify more vulnerabilities that perhaps aren't on the list.

I don't want to give the impression that the Molybdenum-99 story is one of the wikileaks leaks. It may be, but I don't know. The story I head on the radio had to do with the fact that some team in South Africa invented a way to produce Molybdenum-99 without needing to use highly-enriched uranium.

Security through obscurity doesn't work in the long-term. In the meantime, in the real world, if someone has made a mistake and introduced a security hole, the hole needs to be obscured until a fix is in place. The nature of this fix can range from the easy to the excruciatingly painful, and isn't always feasible in a short amount of time. Exposing such weaknesses helps nobody. All that has been done is to expose a set of targets now.

To quote from the reporting over at CNN on this story:

Isn't it naive to assume that exposing this information is better than keeping it secret? I don't know where this list is, but if some of these targets are owned by allies, the United States won't control the timeframe in which a fix for this security hole is implemented. Take for instance, a story I heard this morning on the radio where they mentioned that medical imaging for oncology tests are heavily dependant on Molybdenum-99 - the production of which requires highly enriched uranium - weapons grade in fact. The source of all the Molybdenum-99 in the US comes from two civillian facilities - one in Canada and one in the Netherlands. Exposing security vulnerabilities at these installations would be highly irresponsible.

...and that is an assertion of your own. Where is your reasoning / evidence to show that this assertion is true?

What you are perhaps not seeing is that the embarassment might not be that of the US government. Take for instance the case of the Yemen president (prime minister?) saying that he would tell his countrymen that the missiles that were used on the attack in Yemen were Yemeni missiles, not American. Is the US the embarassed party here? No - its the Yemeni government. But now that this is out there, the US - Yemeni relationship will have cool, and this hurts American interests.

As an American, I think Wikileaks screwed my country. I applaud Amazon's action on this - whether they did it on moral or business principles.

Thats not the way the justice system is supposed to work: the punishment must fit the crime. For example, one could mandate the death penalty for something like littering in order to deter even the rich from littering. This would certainly meeting the criteria of being equally unfair to everyone, but it isn't justice. Justice is about being fair to everyone - not the opposite.

I'm chipping in with a "me too" in that the corny, screwed up finale of BSG is what made me lose interest in Caprica. It took a serious, thought provoking series and made a farce out of it. The worst part about BSG had always been for me the "head-Six" or the "head-Balthar", and I kept hoping for a better explanation than the mystical non-explanation that they came up with. Also, there were so many gaping holes. As has been pointed out by many people, if the child skeleton of Hera had been discovered in the future, how could she have been an ancestor of people in the future? Why did Cavil kill himself - that wasn't believable at all. The whole Angel - Kara - nonsense was too much to believe in either. I like science fiction. Science fantasy has a place too. But a show positioned as science fiction using fantasy plot lines? Garh - can't stand it.

This is an uneasy truce where two competitors agree to not put pressure on the swords that they have at each others throats. Oracle invested considerably in Sun, and knows that the biggest asset that Sun brings to the table is their Java related people and knowledge-base (and not Sun's proprietary hardware). Java is incredible valuable to Oracle since they have also bought up BEA Systems (who produced WebLogic - leading J2EE container) and are using this acquisition to position them as a vendor that can do everything and anything in software space (like IBM). IBM can jeopardize this by splintering the Java brand and developing OpenJDK further. Conversely, IBM doesn't want Oracle to spike its Java food pool with Oracle poison, and sees this initiative as a way to not expend resources on an all-out war with Oracle. If anything, IBM is much more invested in Java, and stands to lose a lot more with Java splintering.

Of course, both these companies don't want the open source world to take Java away from them either. This is also a "both of us against the rest of the world" posture, which seems to smack of anti-competitive behavior.

It is unreasonable to expect that any secret that is published will be kept a secret for any length of time. It is true that people had been remarkably good-natured about keeping the plot-twist of the Mousetrap to themselves. But had they gone the other way, Agatha Christie would have no grounds to complain. That is the nature of the beast: a secret that is told, is no longer a secret. I don't see why this would impact the arts. After all, people still read Shakespear even after knowing that Macbeth turns evil (yes - sue me), and read "The wizard of Oz" even after knowing that the Wizard is an old man from Omaha (again - sue me), and watch Friends reruns on TV even after knowing that Rachel and Ross get together in the end (once again - sue me). People still go to see the Mona Lisa, climb the Eiffel, visit the Sistine Chapel, even though they know full well what they will see. In most of the arts, its the journey that matters - not the punch line at the end.

I do appreciate that some stories are fully about the plot twist. To take an example from Christie's work - nobody can forget who the murderer is, once they know who killed Roger Ackroyd. But publishing a work of art does not give one a license to muzzle one's audience. So, while Agatha Christie (and her descendants) may politely request people to refrain from spoiling details, they should shut up when people excercise their freedom of expression.

Actually, they aren't even paid to do that. Their job is not to fix someone but to stabilize them enough to take them out of crisis mode. Fixing is done by regular physicians.