81–90 of 228 posts
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.
During my 2 years consulting in global investment banks in NYC, it was standard practice for all employees, internal or external, with access to sensitive data or IP to undergo comprehensive IP compliance training and execution of IP agreements. This had to be performed within a month or so of engagement or your badge and account would be deactivated. Every year at a particular client required the training to be repeated.
It was inculcated that violations of such policy had a high likelihood of being caught and would carry very significant penalties. In my experience, they successfully established very taboo cultures around transmitting IP out of their systems.
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 somethin…
By both the letter of what you agree to and industry standard it's not really ethical to dump your employer's code into Dropbox or whatever. They go a long way to block it, blocking sharing sites, USB ports, etc. I'm not saying it doesn't happen all the time, just like brokers taking their client lists. People justify it by saying 'really, I'm supposed to look these people up in the phone book?' or 'really, I'm supposed to re-implement this simple function?'
How unethical sort of depends on how much of an edge you take, it's one thing if it's stuff you did yourself that would be inconvenient to recreate, the equivalent of your spiral notebook, something else if it's what other people did that would have been impossible to recreate.
But I think Serge demonstrates ignorance and naivete by thinking that was normal practice, and both Serge and Lewis demonstrate an ethical blind spot.
Did he deserve to be made an example of? I have no idea if he did or why that happened. Maybe there was stuff in there that was viewed as very proprietary. Maybe it was clever, or they just had an inflated sense of its value. Maybe what seemed trivial to Serge seemed extremely valuable and proprietary to GS. Or maybe he just pissed off the wrong guy. Or maybe they were getting poached a lot and decided to take a stand. I don't think we'll ever know. Certainly not based on this article.
This is the first front-paged post I know of where nobody's invoked Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which I find particularly ironic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The exact details (which aren't disputed) are covered in: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/021110aleyn... Basically he'd written a backup program which was specifically designed to compress both his home directory and propriety code from elsewhere on the system into a file (which it would do depended on parameters passed). On his last day of employment he ran it several times with different parameters…
It's hard to believe he did it accidentally. He probably just underestimated GS's reaction and didn't think it was a big deal. Firms like GS and other HFTs are excessively sensitive about their IP - especially the code base. Whenever an employee leaves, especially to go to a competitor, they're going to have a team of people checking what that person did. When you get in bed with the devil, you need to accept the rul…
I agree its pretty obvious that this was a deliberate action
edit: added quote from court record below.
"...because of the way this software interfaces with the various markets and exchanges, the bank has raised a possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways."
See page 8 http://www.scribd.com/doc/17191934/USAvSergeyAleynikov-7409-...
I was on a jury for a murder trial, and so I have some insight into how juries work. At one point, when I was splitting some hairs and discussing the meaning of some small details from the evidence, one of the other jurors got impatient and reached for the coroner's photo of the victim. "Someone died here, you realize."
This makes me angry. Not just the story itself, but the way VF goes about telling it, which commits the same sins (albeit with better intent) as Goldman Sachs. "So-called 'subversion repository'?" Why don't we just accuse him of summoning demons while we're at it?
Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but I think the author's emphasizing that the term itself sounds like damning evidence to anyone who doesn't know better, since subversion means "a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system by persons working secretly from within." He's pointing out that agent used such terms without understanding them (or exploited the public's ignorance to ma…
Especially if you are thinking (later in the article, quoting the programmer), 'they wouldn't like it', 'it was like speeding, in a stolen car'.
This is the first front-paged post I know of where nobody's invoked Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which I find particularly ironic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
The article was very sympathetic toward Aleynikov and accounts his acquittal on appeal, so it breaks that "law" (which IMHO is upheld primarily due to confirmation bias).
I agree; this was my point. Its frustrating to trot out a trite middlebrow dismissal for when we don't like something and to pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.