Kudos to InfoWorld for researching and breaking its story about the sudden-death vulnerability built into every Oracle database. This is a classic piece of technology journalism, researched over a two-month period during which the editorial team “conducted our own tests, verified information with sources we believe to be reliable, and consulted extensively with Oracle itself.”
Such in-depth and professional journalistic research is so rare in today’s instant-gratification world of Techmeme-fueled technology reporting that Business Insider found it hard to grok exactly what was happening: “In a weird twist of events, the hole was actually found by Infoworld, a news site that covers the tech industry …”
Wow, a news site actually researching its own stories — how weird is that? Apparently that is such an old-fashioned concept that today’s tech bloggers find it outlandish, so inured they are to their role as echo chambers for other people’s press releases, product launches and rumor mills. But then of course, as we all know, enterprise software is utterly boring and today’s media has far more entertaining matters to concern itself with. Who cares that a multi-billion dollar software company has been covering up a product flaw that could bring mission-critical processes at major corporations to a sudden, shuddering halt?
Of course this is in fact a hugely significant story and although the majority of tech coverage today is simply asleep at the switch when it comes to the really important topics, fortunately the team at InfoWorld had the courage and the patience to invest in ferreting out the truth of this story.
