Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by GeneralMayhem » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 4:28 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #68

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #62

An interesting takeaway from this piece is that GS is blatantly and systematically violating the terms of the MIT license, GPL, and whatever else they happen to get their hands on. I'd love nothing more than for the FSF to take them to court over it.

That's only true if they distribute the code, is it not?

IANAL, but I don't think so. Practically, probably; legally, unknown.

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

That makes it sound like ripping the license out and replacing it with a proprietary one, even for purely internal use, is probably a bad idea. I don't know who'd be able to sue them for that, though, if the original copyright "owners" aren't supposed to have seen it in the first place.

Article II of the GPL has a specific exception for transferring GPL-ed software to employees to work on without letting them spread it beyond that, but I don't know how much of this that would cover.

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

#92

Post by beerscout » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

justinhj wrote: post #78

The only thing I find odd is the deleting of the bash history. There are no passwords in there, unless you type one by accident.

If he used wget (or similar utility) he could specify password as a command line argument. It's not a very good practice security-wise but people do this sometimes.

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

#93

Post by gknoy » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 4:35 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #48

The justice system is, of course, still in the business of catching and punishing murderers, thieves and such. But, with the decline in crime since the early '90s, this side of their activity is becoming increasingly supplemented by a different game altogether: enforcing a growing set of complex laws against practically everything [1]. There is a lot of prosecutorial discretion in choosing which of these laws to enfo…

Once targeted by something like this, how does one go about finding a competent lawyer? How do I evaluate their competency?

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

#94

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 4:59 PM UTC

tehwalrus wrote: post #88

impendia wrote: post #14

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."

I was on a jury (robbery) in the UK. It's a crime to say, afterwards, what happened in a jury room in the UK.

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by mathattack » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:08 PM UTC

They did mug him, but it's considered a huge no-no in financial services to take any kind of code home. It's impossible that he didn't know the gravity of what he was doing when he did it. It's always a terminatable offense at the very least, and frequently leads to more.

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

#96

Post by aqme28 » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:13 PM UTC

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #83

lgeek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No way. You sign away any rights to anything you come up with. You get the lecture on it. This guy Serge got shut down when he wanted to open source something. (although GS has open sourced some simple and non-strategic stuff, as a presumable PR move) 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…

But he's arguing that he worked on open-source code, which isn't something he is legally able to sign over the rights of.

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

#97

Post by j_baker » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:15 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #48

The justice system is, of course, still in the business of catching and punishing murderers, thieves and such. But, with the decline in crime since the early '90s, this side of their activity is becoming increasingly supplemented by a different game altogether: enforcing a growing set of complex laws against practically everything [1]. There is a lot of prosecutorial discretion in choosing which of these laws to enfo…

Most importantly, don't say anything that might incriminate you. Even if they have you on video doing it with hundreds of witnesses and DNA evidence.

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

#98

Post by ben0x539 » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:17 PM UTC

Fuxy wrote: post #87

That's the problem with the American judicial system. Whenever they want to convict someone innocent of a bullshit crime they just assemble of idiots who just say guilty to go home to their trailer. Have they heard of the phrase "jury of their pears" that actually means pears not of the same species. I wouldn't consider any of the people on that jury my pears.

(peers)

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

#99

Post by kasey_junk » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:18 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #73

kasey_junk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

I rarely nuke my entire history, but frequently prune commands out of it.

As I develop I frequently change parameters/calling conventions on the applications I'm writing. While scanning the history I don't want bad commands to still be there.

Bash history was never meant to be an audit trail and treating manipulating it as some form of security violation is idiotic.

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

#100

Post by j_baker » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:18 PM UTC

When I took Criminology (or perhaps it was Deviance), my professor made me read this book: http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Going-To-Prison/dp/1559501197

It was written decades ago, and is still relevant today. Sadly, I think programmers should begin reading it, as prison seems to be growing into a larger threat for us.