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Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

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Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#71

Post by lgeek »

melling wrote: post #18

In case people aren't clear on this. He worked in an industry that takes this sort of thing very seriously. He shouldn't have even been trying to download open source from work. You don't email stuff home to work on it, for example.

Initially I thought something along these lines as well. But according to the article, it was common practice:

> They’d followed his case in the newspapers and noted the shiver it had sent down the spines of Wall Street’s software developers. Until Serge was sent to jail for doing it, Wall Street programmers routinely took code they had worked on when they left for new jobs. “A guy got put in jail for taking something no one understood,” as one of them put it. “Every tech programmer out there got the message: Take code and you could go to jail. It was huge.”

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#72

Post by Geekette »

Wow. Naivete is a bitch... Or one hell of a drug, depending on your viewing angle.

And given his re-arrest on what appear to be spurious charges (1st set were thrown out on appeal), I can't help but agree with this comment on VF: "When Goldman says 'jump', the gov't says: 'How high?'"

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#73

Post by dekhn »

kasey_junk wrote: post #12
ig1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is he copied a bunch of confidential code off company servers and then deleted the audit trail from the servers. He claimed that the confidential code copied was accidental and that he only meant to copy some open source code.

It's a little harsh to say he deleted the audit trail. He deleted his bash history. Something I do on a near daily basis.

Why do you delete your bash history daily. For "security"?

He deleted his bash history (AFAICT) because it had passwords in it.

if you are entering passwords on the command line such that it lands in your history, then you "delete it at the end of the day", you're not securing anything.

you can turn off history for one command. That's better than deleting bash_history (well, I don't know what an auditor would say about that).

But you should be storing your passwords in secure files, not entering them on the command line.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#74

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

ig1 wrote: post #65
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if he really wanted to take only open source code, he could have cleared it with his managers and his compliance officer, and they would have let him take stuff that is clearly open source most likely. The VF story addressed that (page 4, near the bottom). According to Aleynikov, GS cared not a bit for the terms of the Open Source license and considered anything that ever made it into their systems as GS proprietary…

With the vast majority of open source software licences (including the GPL) you're perfectly entitled to integrated it into your propriety code without releasing it if you're not distributing it externally. The only exception of any size is the Affero GPL but even that only applies if you use the code in an external customer facing service.

I probably should have phrased that more carefully. GS appears to care little for Open Source principles.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#76

Post by cgshaw »

ionforce wrote: post #58
cgshaw wrote: post #15

As an attorney and someone moderately interested in politics, it's becoming more and more clear that technical literacy is going to play a huge role in law and policy. We desperately need more politicians, bureaucrats and law enforcement who at least have some basic technical knowledge. Empathy is the only way to prevent stuff like this.

Usually people who attain technical knowledge are the same type to avoid politics. Politics is a "soft" game of imperfections, where as technical knowledge is the opposite. Cold, hard, objective. What incentive is there for technically-equipped folk to deal with the imperfections and heartache of interacting with non-technical folk than to take a white collar job amongst other technically-minded folk?

I completely agree.

Maybe it should be more incumbent on politicians and law enforcement to learn more about technology and incorporate more private citizens as opposed to just big corporations in the dialogue.

It's frustrating, I think everyone realizes that technology is going to become a greater and greater part of every day life in government and yet there hasn't been much of a push for elected officials to give a shit to do anything but fundraise with it.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#77

Post by pdovy »

melling wrote: post #18

In case people aren't clear on this. He worked in an industry that takes this sort of thing very seriously. He shouldn't have even been trying to download open source from work. You don't email stuff home to work on it, for example.

I would think this would be common sense at any job - unless otherwise specified in your contract the work that you do for your employer belongs to your employer, full stop. According to the article he freely admits that what he took included proprietary code - that is theft.

Now, was Goldman reasonable here? No, we can probably all agree that Goldman and the government overstepped a lot of bounds chasing this guy down. That said, I don't think some form of prosecution was unreasonable.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#79

Post by gd1 »

chrisgd wrote: post #37
kenjagi wrote: post #22

That article is riddled with inaccuracies.

Try listing them

His 'second jury' were comical.

"Most were surprised by how little he had taken in relation to the whole: eight megabytes in a platform that consisted of an estimated one gigabyte of code. "

Really? One gigabyte of code? Or one gigabyte of third party binaries, precompiled libraries, documentation etc.? All you need are the source files, and those language keywords compress nicely. Exactly how much plain text do you think they have?

' "But that’s the secret sauce, if there is one,” said the juror. “If you’re going to take something, take the strats.” '

Rubbish. The strats are the easy (or at least easier) bit in the high frequency space. That's like taking a dump of the html from facebook/twitter and thinking you've stolen their site. It's the scalable, distributed infrastructure that drives large websites, and it's the fastest possible infrastructure that drives HFT. One thing Lewis got right is the Coke/Pepsi analogy, and it really is that simple. A straight up race.

" “It’s way easier to start from scratch.” "

It is, and it isn't. In even the worst codebase there will be nuggets of usefulness that will accelerate the process. Isolated parts of the system that you've perfected. Exchange message decoders for example (ITCH, FIX/FAST, etc.). This is especially true when you, the genius who will be starting from scratch, has worked on it for a few years. I assume he was doing something useful in his time at Goldman.

I'm not buying the innocent act.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#80

Post by vasilipupkin »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #63
vasilipupkin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if he really wanted to take only open source code, he could have cleared it with his managers and his compliance officer, and they would have let him take stuff that is clearly open source most likely.

>if he really wanted to take only open source code, he could have cleared it with his managers and his compliance officer, and they would have let him take stuff that is clearly open source most likely. The VF story addressed that (page 4, near the bottom). According to Aleynikov, GS cared not a bit for the terms of the Open Source license and considered anything that ever made it into their systems as GS proprietary…

Yep - but in this case it's also something that they would have made very clear upfront and made him sign a document to show that he had understood those terms
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