Contractor admits planting logic bombs in his software • Hacker News Board

Re: Contractor admits planting logic bombs in his software

#151

Post by ropiwqefjnpoa » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #148

rumanator wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're confusing criminal liability with civil liability.

Does it matter? Practically, what seems more just to you: jail time, or remuneration with additional penalties?

That would be interesting, the victim gets to decide the penalty (up to a limit of course). The perp would have to plead their case to the victim directly, not just the judge. No jury necessary unless requested.

Re: Contractor admits planting logic bombs in his software

#152

Post by deusofnull » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

hurricanetc wrote: post #40

I read the DOJ link and it just states “intentional damage to a protected computer.” If he had accidentally written sloppy code that happened to break periodically would that have been illegal? I don’t fully understand what law he broke and how such a law would not also apply to the seemingly infinite cases of built in obsolescence.

Im curious about that too. If you were a skilled programmer who studied common bugs, you could introduce those bugs intentionally but with plausible deniability if caught. Then again, in a smaller system that would be easier to detect. But in a multi page web app or something with a big back end, def could slip those in

Re: Contractor admits planting logic bombs in his software

#153

Post by perl4ever » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #138

perl4ever wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that planned obsolescence is unintentional. If it's not completely secret , it's not admitted to either, and it's not illegal because it's not illegal. Is it particularly that you think that there isn't a continuum from legal actions to illegal actions? Isn't it possible and common that two instances of similar actions can be on the right and wrong sides of the law?

Planned obsolescence is not at all unintentional, it is highly deliberate. Every product needs to plan for it's intended lifespan, from phones to nuclear reactors. Planned obsolescence and what this contractor did are not on any sort of continuum. This contractor was not making a trade-off, he deliberately sabotaged his work. This is not on any sort of continuum with optimizing phone's battery life for a certain numb…

What I think you're ignoring is that they are both examples of utilizing dishonesty for profit.

Planned obsolescence could in the abstract be just about making a trade-off between price and durability, but in all real instances it leverages the fact that the consumer can't reliably assess the ratio of cost to lifespan of a product. If the trade-off was transparent to the buyer, then competition would produce much more durable products, even if not infinitely durable.

Re: Contractor admits planting logic bombs in his software

#154

Post by perl4ever » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 11:50 PM UTC

rumanator wrote: post #150

nerdponx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about 2 different things. The implication with "planned obsolecence" here is that the device becomes nonfunctional or less-functional because the manufacturer simply designed it to fail after a while. See for example the Phoebus Cartel, who actually fined manufacturers who made lightbulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.

> because the manufacturer simply designed it to fail after a while. You're missing the whole point. Everything fails after a while. Everything. It's the engineer's job to ensure that it fails only after X amount of use, which can be expressed in time of normal usage. There are no time bombs, only the fact that designers picked a small service life.

The point is not that tradeoffs are inherently unethical, it's that in practice, deceiving the customer about those tradeoffs affects how they are made. You go to the supermarket and they have to post unit prices so you can compare, although this is gamed as much as possible. But you go and look at shoes, and you can only guess whether the $100 pair is going to last proportionally longer than the $80 pair. Some things, like tires and cars, you can get information from others experience and testing about lifespan, but even so, there is still a segment of the market that buys the poor quality products which is being deceived in the sense that they might well choose differently if it was thrown in their face how they are being screwed.

Re: Contractor admits planting logic bombs in his software

#155

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

rumanator wrote: post #140

perl4ever wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Deliberately introducing errors in one's work to defraud an employer is not remotely close to planned obsolescence" Perhaps, but it's two points on the same continuum.

> Perhaps, but it's two points on the same continuum. They really aren't. All engineered products are designed to meet a target service life. Even today's houses are designed with a design lifespan of 50 years. A consumer product is not different.

Saying all products have an engineered service life is beside the point. Planned obsolescence is not transparent. They don't tell you what those engineering decisions are - they don't put labels saying this item costs $X/year and this item costs $Y/year. Consumers would choose differently if they had trustworthy information for everything. Saying people are ok with that is like saying people choose to get melamine in their milk if they choose the cheapest.

Re: Contractor admits planting logic bombs in his software

#156

Post by henvic » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #94

henvic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course if he just wrote bad spaghetti code with no boundaries, no tests, and that breaks everything from time to time, he'd have locked in the company, make other developer's experience a nightmare, and so on and get away with it. I think this might explain a few things I have seen or heard about in my life.

well only if it was password protected bad spaghetti code, otherwise they would have had a better developer look at the spaghetti and unravel it. But he wouldn't have gotten any jail time.

I'm thinking more about a 'soft lock-in' situation: the developer writes bad code, but not as bad that you need to start over or stop using it. Just bad enough that only they will understand it and other people who try to contribute will get mad and waste a lot of time and effort to deal with it, so in the end, the bad developer continues writing their shitty code because no one else wants to get involved (and there are plenty of opportunities elsewhere).