Science isn't just about discovering information. Dissemination is critical. Communicating ideas is just as important as discovering them and promotion is part of effective communication. It's natural and healthy for researchers to promote their ideas.

Names are critical to enable discussion.

The "marketing" page is where documentation is. Summaries that don't require reading a whole academic papers are a good thing, and they are the place where all the different links are collected. Same reason software has READMEs.

Logos... are cute and take 10-60 minutes? If you spend months on some research might as well take the satisfaction of giving it a cute logo, why not.

Well, names are useful for the same reason people's names are useful. The rest just kinda happens naturally, I think.

Yes, it saves time vs. starting a discussion on "that crypto cache sidechannel attack that one team in China found".

Name makes enough sense. "Branding, marketing page, etc..." was my question.

"Happens naturally" isn't really an answer.

Is your position that any write-up about an attack must be plain text only, and must not use its own URL?

I truly cannot understand why this is brought up so often. You aren't paying for it, it doesn't hurt you in any way, it detracts nothing from the findings (in fact, it makes the findings easier to discuss), etc. There is no downside I can think of.

Can you share what the downsides of a picture of a puppy and a $5 domain are? Sorry, "branding" and "marketing page"?

Or at least, maybe you can share what you think would be a more preferable way?

Dunno, but I'm glad they do it. In other fields of research, researchers often purposely hold off on naming something, so that the community kind of has no choice but to name it after the authors themselves.

Eg in my field, they would have called Spectre "the Horn-Genkin-Hamburg vulnerability" or something. Which one of these is hard-to-remember jargon, and which one is catchy and evocative?

It's science these days. They need funding, one way is to get people to recognize the importance of their work

So people talk about it

Why does the comments of every such attack need a question about why it has its own branding, marketing page, etc…? Genuine question.

(Seriously, this comes up every time, just do a search for it if you actually want to figure out why.)

Because it makes it feel like you need some marketing department if you want to publish your work. Rather than give _only_ the work merit, we give too much merit to its colorful presentation. That shouldn't be the case.

Good communication has always been a part of making sure your work is influential.