Mozilla Gives 12-Year-Old $3000 for Discovering Major Firefox Security Flaw

Today's 12-year-olds don't just know more than we do -- they're also a lot richer than we are. Case in point: seventh grader Alex Miller, from San Jose. Alex, you see, recently discovered a critical security flaw in the latest versions of Firefox -- something to do with an overflow bug in 'document.write.' That may sound like Chinese to most of the human population (minus the Chinese), but it didn't to Alex (who, coincidentally enough, spends his spare time studying Mandarin. And playing badminton. And listening to NPR.). The prepubescent prodigy immediately notified Mozilla, and, as a result, made some serious bank.

In a show of gratitude to the not-yet-teenage wunderkind, Mozilla paid Alex a full $3,000. Three grand, of course, won't pay for this kid's inevitable Cal Tech education, but it's still a pretty handsome income for relatively little work. According to the San Jose Mercury, Miller spent about 90 minutes a day for 10 days searching for the bug -- which, as Download Squad points out, means that he made $3000 for 15 hours of work. That's $200 an hour. That kind of paper definitely places him at the top of the 12-year-old income bracket, but we're fairy fairly confident that he'll make way more money once he's of legal working age.

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Mozilla Gives 12-Year-Old $3000 for Discovering Major Firefox Security Flaw originally appeared on Switched on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.switched.com/2010/10/25/alex-miller-gets-3000-firefox-security-flaw/

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