Remember that at giant tech companies, the incentive is to pay out bounties --- there are people on the vendor's team whose performance is measured in part by how much the program pays out.
UPDATE! Within a day of this blowing up on Hacker News, AMD reached back
out to me and said they would be looking into the matter after all.
A non-default-installation set of AMD tools (Ryzen Master and probably others) had an auto-updater which used HTTP instead of HTTPS. It's clear this is a feature they'd basically forgotten about; it even pointed to an ATI domain. A third-party bug bounty company rejected it because MITM was out of scope. AMD are incompetent at making software (news at 11), kept asking for extensions, and took an incredible amount of time to deal with it. Eventually they removed this updater entirely and replaced it with one in the app (rather than the installer) that uses HTTPS + a CRC32 (for some reason). The initial vuln was very stupid and should have been fixed faster. As for the current system, if you're mad about HTTPS-protected auto-updaters (which is valid), you've probably got a lot of them to go to war against.
Or, alternatively, and especially in gender relations, any lie intended to manipulate or demean another person. As opposed to lying to protect yourself, to swindle somebody, or some other reason. This is closer to the original idea, but still not there.
Those that have access to international network links.
Those that have the ability to generate new firmware that simply passes the CRC32 checksum.
Nobody but AMD gives a fuck about AMD's internal policies or motivations.
I've written about this before here, but to sum it up:
* Unless something wild happens in software engineering (formal methods, &c) as a result of AI, there's no such thing as eradicating security vulnerabilities. Focused programs can eliminate low-hanging fruit, but at the point where you're offering significant bounties part of the premise is that all that fruit has been plucked. The marginal security impact of a single bounty award, by itself, is immaterial.
* What bounty programs can do is focus internal engineering attention. Large product teams have huge backlogs of issues and security design punch lists. For features and feature bugs, there's a closed loop that prioritizes the work: the market. For security vulnerabilities, bounties serve a similar purpose. This is why many bounties are tightly scoped; the whole point of the program is to direct the efforts of specific product teams.
* When we're talking about 10,000+ person engineering teams, the most important thing to know about bug bounty programs is that the company is incentivized to pay out. No major tech company that runs a bounty is "covering up" vulnerabilities. There's no reason for them to do so. They're running a program that ostentatiously pays rewards to people who report vulnerabilities! There are people on the teams managing the bounties who in effect get paid more when the program pays out more: that's what success looks like.
You add all this stuff up and all the drama about AMD (or Google or whoever) being shady or stingy basically never add up.