Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

Is that true?

(the rest of the paragraph was interesting, and worth repeating for anyone who read the whole article):

Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he says. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time.”

Secondly: Being fired is not what happened to this guy. He was prosecuted and sent to prison. Not even remotely the same thing.

The next problem is that prosecutors systematically reinforce confirmation bias in presenting their case. The probability that someone has brown eyes and is 5'7" tall and lives in New York and knows the victim and has a motive etc. etc. would seem to be strong evidence (especially if you're assuming them all to be independent, which they're not), but that only works if you're taking an unbiased sample of the possible characteristics of the perpetrator, which the prosecutor explicitly does the opposite of. If there is no apparent motive, or the knife used to kill the victim isn't a match for the one the defendant is known to have, or the perpetrator was wearing a suit and the defendant isn't known to own a suit, you won't hear any of that from the prosecution. And if you only consider the things that match, using the article's flawed method, all additional evidence can only ever increase the probability of guilt, since any evidence to the contrary doesn't make it into the calculation. All you have to do is keep collecting evidence and excluding anything that doesn't comport with the prosecution's theory of the crime and soon you have a seemingly insurmountable case.

Then you have the "DNA database" problem with statistics. Take a 1 in 10,000 chance and it sounds like solid proof ("99.99%") but if the population you're testing against is 6,000,000,000 people then you still have a pool of suspects containing 600,000 people. You can't then just pick one of those people arbitrarily and claim a 99.99% chance that that was the perpetrator, the probability that a person is the actual perpetrator if chosen at random from the group of individuals whose DNA would match is only ~0.000167%. It isn't good enough to prove that a defendant is statistically in the top thousand people in the city as far as probability to have been the perpetrator of a particular crime. You still have to exclude all the others or you'll convict the wrong man.

The second case for sending secrets is closer to legit. But only because if you send secrets out at all, if you didn't have permission, it could be illegal.

The REAL issue is font work for asshats that don't play nice. Alternately, accept that as a programmer mixing hobby Open Source projects with your Employment projects is a recipe for trouble.. Take their money and be a sucky leacher.. Or post your fixes to maintainers from home, reengineered solely at home with no files from work.

As somebody who does admin work, its a great excuse just to not take work home at all unless its on my company laptop.