In a nutshell, this keeps happening:

Silent Circle’s an interesting case, since it’s gotten some gentle criticism lately from a variety of folks — well, mostly Nadim Kobeissi — for being partially closed-source and for having received no real security audits. Nadim’s typical, understated critique goes like this:

Silent Circle is morally bankrupt for promoting its unreviewed, closed-source, centralized crypto software and marketing it as “secure.”

— Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora) November 6, 2012

And is usually followed by the whole world telling Nadim he’s being a jerk. Eventually a tech reporter notices the fracas and chimes in to tell us the whole Infosec community is a bunch of jerks:

This twitter.com/marshray/statu… is exactly the kind of thing that makes a community look juvenile, petty and not ready for primetime.

— Quinn Norton (@quinnnorton) November 7, 2012

And the cycle repeats, without anyone having actually learned much at all. (Really, it’s enough to make you think Twitter isn’t the right place to get your Infosec news.)

Yep. And we need more, diverse and less judgemental reporters.

Update: Incidentally, the Tweet that Quinn took exception to is this:

.@ioerror may not have formally endorsed @cryptocatapp, but he did put one of @kaepora‘s crayon cat drawings up on his refrigerator.

— Marsh Ray (@marshray) November 7, 2012

How this is juvenile Why we should do without charm and humour when on Twitter and amongst our own kind, eludes me. Perhaps infosec people are meant to be serious about everything?

Massive HT to @matthew_d_green and @marshray