Nonsense. The demand isn't created by governments seeking to purchase the exploits, it's created by criminal organizations willing to use exploits for botnets, identity theft, and other monetization models. That ZDI, and VUPEN etc are purchasing exploits only improves security.
View it like this. The exploits are out there, discovered and used by black hats. The idea that a whitehat security researcher is in anyway decreasing the level of security by selling an exploit to Google, or Apple, or any third party, is silly.
The more security researchers that are evaluating software, the more secure we'll be. Zero days will always be around, simply because the incentives are still favoring the blackhats. Until that's reversed, we'll be playing catch up.
The government buying exploits has nothing to do with why we can't have "nice things." We can't have "nice things" because this is a hard world, with people who won't blink to take advantage of poorly designed and poorly coded software.
View it like this. The exploits are out there, discovered and used by black hats. The idea that a whitehat security researcher is in anyway decreasing the level of security by selling an exploit to Google, or Apple, or any third party, is silly.
The more security researchers that are evaluating software, the more secure we'll be. Zero days will always be around, simply because the incentives are still favoring the blackhats. Until that's reversed, we'll be playing catch up.
The government buying exploits has nothing to do with why we can't have "nice things." We can't have "nice things" because this is a hard world, with people who won't blink to take advantage of poorly designed and poorly coded software.