341–350 of 520 posts
The one example I am willing to share is in high school economics class there was a stock market simulation. The person with the highest portfolio balance at the end of the year received a substantial amount of extra credit. First of all, this was 1999, and the market (tech-stocks) were in peak ridiculous bubble mode. The hack was that the software used to simulate trades and track portfolios used delayed quotes. So,…
Worked for a company that was contracted by DOW to make an app promoting some extremely toxic agrochemicals, such as Forefront. They talked about this being so poisonious that if animals eat grass sprayed with it, then crops grown with their manure will be unsuitable for human consumption. Was also asked to fake ("round up") the calculations of how much money you'd save if by those chemicals. Read up a bit about DOW…
I made software 15 years ago to automatically buy concert and sports tickets from Ticketmaster and other websites. At the moment tickets went on sale we used hundreds of computers to buy up the good tickets. I'm sorry your daughter didn't get Nsync tickets.
That's just arbitrage, right? If you're able to sell them at higher prices, the venue should've done it themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly disagree. Even if we ignore confidentiality and security issues, there is a fundamental difference between contractors and employees. Employees are generally paid less than contractors and are provided stability inn return the company gets a stable employee. Contractors are expected to be shorter term and change tasking if new opportunities arise, even for a short time. If both parties enter into a deal th…
Oh, so companies can engage in these tactics, but not the little people? How quaint.
When an employee does it without informing the employer or signing an agreement that holds the contractor to the same standards as the employee the chain of trust, transparency and accountability is broken.
I've done a lot of work involving scraping, data analysis and reversing private API access from mobile applications. A lot of this work is legally defensible (if you do it correctly) and not particularly unethical. After doing a bunch of this type of work I started to accrue subject matter expertise in the area that led other companies to come to me with more questionable projects in mind. I turned down many of these…
Sounds like you would be a valuable member of any company, especially a startup. I’d love to hear your thoughts on more ethical ideas for analyzing difficult to obtain data. Feel free to ping me directly.
See, this data is not difficult to obtain if you're operating in an ethical manner.
You can't do ethical analysis of data obtained in an unethical fashion. Fruit of the poisoned tree and all that. I guess it worked for radiologists after nazi germany however...
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I created software that was used by call center agents to bid on “bathroom” break time slots and kept track of who was on break and actively punished those who didn’t follow the rules. It rewarded those that had higher performance and who took less breaks with higher priority. If an agent didn’t come back from their break a security guard would automatically be dispatched to find them. For the same company I also mad…
I often say that telemarketing should be considered a less honourable occupation than prostitution (in the latter case, you have two people voluntarily exchanging value; in the former case, you have one person trying to scam the other). Now I'm beginning to suspect it also has worse working conditions.
After Jared Kushner originally bought the New York Observer, I was hired to lead the tech team, which I did for a year and a half in house then for three more as a vendor. He asked me, out of band, to blackhole articles critical of his commercial real estate colleagues and I complied.
Not a programmer at the time, but a system administrator. I won't mention the company. This was 2011-2012 -ish. We hosted dedicated servers and most of the time, they were mostly Plesk or cPanel servers run by people selling email and or web hosting to hundreds of clients from a single server. This one time a client joins the network, buys a server from us, and migrates from Rackspace. We wondered why he'd move from…
UKFast is a UK-based web host whose CEO has received an MBE. Probably not that many other web host CEOs with an award from the Queen.
> UKFast - your future is our business.
Turns out it's meant seriously.
Worked for a company that was contracted by DOW to make an app promoting some extremely toxic agrochemicals, such as Forefront. They talked about this being so poisonious that if animals eat grass sprayed with it, then crops grown with their manure will be unsuitable for human consumption. Was also asked to fake ("round up") the calculations of how much money you'd save if by those chemicals. Read up a bit about DOW…
Why not channel your feelings and talk to a journalist, NGO or regulator willing to act in the public interest?
