Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer? 186
theodp writes "Programmer Sergey Aleynikov holds the dubious distinction of being the only Goldman Sachs employee since the 2008 financial meltdown to have actually served time in prison. After leaving Goldman, Sergey was accused of stealing computer code from his former employer and sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Exactly what he'd done neither the FBI nor the jury seemed to understand, so Moneyball author and financial journalist Michael Lewis decided to give Sergey a second trial, assembling a jury made up of programmers and people familiar with high-frequency trading, and asking them to level a judgment. Their verdict? Not guilty. 'I think it's quite possible that Goldman itself didn't know what he had taken, the value of it, the purpose of it, or anything else,' Lewis concludes. 'There was such turnover at Goldman, and the system was such a hairball, that I think people knew pieces but they didn't know the whole. Serge might have been as close as there was to an expert on the how the whole system worked. I think the valuable thing that Serge took when he walked out the door was himself.' Aleynikov was released on appeal in 2011, but subsequently re-arrested on state charges the following year, so he's still not out of the woods yet."
Lemme get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
Of all the people who wasted and squandered the money of thousands, if not millions, nobody did time in prison, the only person who did was actually not stealing from decent people but from the thieves, and for THAT he goes to jail?
Re:Lemme get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who do the actual stealing are holding presidential cabinet positions. Can't touch this... If there were such a thing as justice, Goldman Sachs' charter would have been revoked a long time ago.
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If there was such a thing as justice, I'd make a killing selling rope and pitchforks... literally.
Re:Lemme get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
That's vengeance, not justice... Asset forfeiture is sufficient.
Re:Lemme get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lemme get this straight (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes justice means both.
Asset forfeiture is sufficient.
Tell that to all the people who died of starvation because Goldman saw profits in artificially inflating the hard red spring wheat futures market.
No, sometimes "justice" does mean torches and pitchforks. Real monsters just don't take the hint otherwise.
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Real monsters have learned that society rewards their behavior. Taking away those rewards will go a very long way to correct the problem.
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Asset forfeiture is not sufficient; it does nothing to compensate for consumed assets like holidays, rentals and such.
Nor does it prevent repeat offending.
Nor does it compensate victims.
As a result, any sufficiently large financial crime can never be fully repaid by it's offender.
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I'd say they have a lifetime to try, it's a good start.
Re: Lemme get this straight (Score:2)
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Only the violent belong in cages. Nice ones too.
We are a wealth society. Only violent people go to prison and even then the cages should be nice.
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The only problem with this is that you will also gleefully cripple Tort law at the same time. The end result is that White collar criminals and corporations are left with no meaningful consequences for their harmful actions. It's not even a theoretical possibility.
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So formulating wars to inflate the profits of the military industrial complex would be a 'white collar crime' even when those wars kill millions. How about pharmaceutical corporations pushing toxic medicines that kill tens of thousands another 'white collar crime'.
So violent, hmm. Lets say I come to your home, grab you and your family toss you out on the street and then confiscate your belongings, if you protest, I assault you and any members of your family that join you and throw you in a confined space
Beyond simple theft (Score:4, Interesting)
If a person is deprived of a very large amount of savings, say an amount that exceeds the lifetime productivity of an average wage-earner, that crime should be put on the level of some lesser version of manslaughter. It's gone beyond theft at that point.
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Asset forfeiture is sufficient.
Asset forfeiture is sufficient punishment for criminal acts? Ok, let's start with car thieves and the like. See how that works with small time crooks and how people accept it. If that works out, we can work up to the major criminals in bespoke suits.
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Re: Lemme get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Lemme get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
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... The entirety of the system needs an overhaul, from laws to prison conditions.
right... with all the different entities (lawyers, police, clerks, judges, guards etc) making big big money on the backs of these "criminals", and add to that the fact that lawyers and judges control the "system", do you really imagine that they are interested in the reforms you are talking about?
the only reforms they are interested in are one's that will be put more money (ie more laws more criminals) into their already well lined pockets.
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solution? go back to a time tested techniques -- minimum security, transportation to elsewhere. eg an island or somethign? one of those aleutian islands in alaska? that would be pretty sweet. maybe the prisoners could run it with their own local gov't and services and such? sounds pretty good to me...
cf. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress [wikipedia.org]
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If there was such a thing as justice, I'd make a killing selling rope and pitchforks... literally.
As a believer in nonviolence, a nice hot barrel of tar and a lot of feathers would do.
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So your for cruel and unusual punishment. A painful and violent one at that.
'In a typical tar-and-feathers attack, the mob's victim was stripped to his waist. Hot tar was either poured or painted onto the person while he was immobilized. Then the victim either had feathers thrown on him or was rolled around on a pile of feathers so they stuck to the tar. Often the victim was then paraded around town on a cart or wooden rail. The aim was to inflict enough pain and humiliation on a person to make him either c
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Perhaps you should save your sanctimony for criminals, and those authorities that conspire not to prosecute the ones wearing bespoke suits, instead of someone blowing off steam on the Internet.
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They are knowingly responsible almost single handedly causing multiple financial crisis or plummeting whole countries in severe dept (just look at Greece as an example).
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Of all the people who wasted and squandered the money of thousands, if not millions
The closest thing to a currency loss and "squandering" was when the FED started rapidly printing money well beyond what the GDP growth indicated was needed.
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This is in sharp contrast to the "new" (really asset swapped) money from QE, which is "real" government money which can't simply disappear the way private credit can.
Tell this to the people with savings. Tell them how the FED creating $80+ billion per month doesnt make the value of their savings disappear.
Re:Lemme get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
Their savings are held as bank deposits at private banks. The "money" the Fed is creating is held by the banks as reserve balances at the Fed itself. In our financial system there is only one operational pathway for reserve balances to enter the economy separately from their role in settling interbank payments, which is as physical U.S. currency AKA Federal Reserve Notes. Physical currency represents only a very small fraction of total reserves. Thus, the total size of all reserve balances held at the Fed has no bearing on the traded value of bank deposits denominated in dollars but held in the private sector (that is, the value of your and my savings). Like I said, Canada's banks typically have overnight reserve balances of ZERO, but that doesn't mean Canadians have no deposits at their private banks or that those deposits have infinite value.
Yet, QE does negatively affect the future value of our savings, not by harming the traded value of the dollar, but by reducing our interest income. During QE, the Fed exchanges reserves (bearing an 0.25% interest rate since 2008), which it "prints" (into a database), for securities (bearing ~3% in the case of Treasuries). The net financial assets of the private sector is unchanged, but its average rate of interest is decreased, negatively impacting its future income. Basically, the Fed is helping the government refinance at a lower rate, which is like a wealth tax on the government's creditors (including us, pensions, foreigners, companies, etc.).
TL;DR: QE is a Bad Thing, but because it decreases the amount of money we have and not the opposite.
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Considering that inflation is still staying well below the usual 3%, I'd have to say it doesn't have much if any impact.
Artificially keeping interest rates ridiculously low is having more of an effect on most people, including myself, as the 0.1% interest I'm earning on my cash doesn't keep up with ANY amount of inflation.
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The Fed isn't "printing money," they are conducting asset swaps in which the private sector exchanges one government debt instrument for another with a lower interest rate.
Are you talking about Operation Twist? That began in September, 2011 and ended in December, 2012, and that was always in addition to QE. QE, or quantitative easing, is when the Fed buys fixed-income securities on the open market. So, you are correct that the Fed is swapping assets, if you mean they are swapping "newly printed money" in exchange for "mortgage-backed securities/U.S. Treasuries".
Anyway, have you seen what has been happening to the monetary base [stlouisfed.org] since 2008? If that is not "rapidly printing mone
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The monetary base is defined as the portion of the commercial banks' reserves that are maintained in accounts with their central bank plus the total currency circulating in the public (which includes the currency, also known as vault cash, that is physically held in the banks' vault).
The money supply generally far exceeds the monetary base and of the total currency circulating in the public plus the non-bank deposits with commercial banks.
The two are disjoint sets. They are related to each other through som
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The money multiplier crashed during the recent economic crisis.
Yes, because of the Fed. The Fed inflated the monetary base like crazy, and then paid interest to the banks to hold on to those excess reserves. Because of that, excess reserves went from 2 billion in 2008 to 1.8 trillion now.
So, what happens when interest rates start to rise and the economy starts to improve? Suddenly, the Fed's 0.25 interest rate is not going to be enough to keep the banks from loaning out all of those excess reserves. And that's when the inflation crisis is really going to take off. Chec
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Yes, that is one theory. However there is a problem with this idea - the MM started its dive BEFORE the monetary base was increased via QE. It started crashing in Sept 2008, when Lehman failed while QE started in November 2008.
It is pretty obvious that the cause was the banks were crapping there pants due to the fact that they were most all BK because of bad loans and were to highly leveraged. As a result they started building reserves like crazy, and put an end to almost all lending. The Fed tried to count
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QE, or quantitative easing, is when the Fed buys fixed-income securities on the open market
Which is exactly what I described. Treasuries and Reserves are both government debt instruments. The only difference between them is the interest rate, because in general Treasuries are highly liquid.
Anyway, have you seen what has been happening to the monetary base [stlouisfed.org] since 2008? If that is not "rapidly printing money", then what is?
Call it whatever you want, but it remains a simple fact there is no mechanism in our system for these reserves to enter the economy. Reserves do not constrain bank lending and adding reserves does not increase bank lending.
Of course, all of this money printing hasn't led to a big spike in consumer prices, nor has it been able to push the unemployment rate below 7% for almost 5 years now.
For reasons expressed by me and by the_eric_conspiracy, there is no reason to expect the
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Treasuries and Reserves are both government debt instruments. The only difference between them is the interest rate, because in general Treasuries are highly liquid.
It sounds like we have a very basic disagreement here on the definition of words. I mean, I don't understand why you would say that Reserves (with a capital R?) are a debt instrument. Reserves are not a debt instrument. They are money, ready to be loaned out at any time. And if money is not "highly liquid", then I don't know what is.
Also, this entire thread started because you claimed that the Fed doesn't "print money", and I still don't understand how you can say that. If I go to a printing press and print
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Exactly what I clicked on the story to say. Of all the people at Goldman Sachs (and facilitating shadiness on the government-end of the symbiosis), this is the guy they go after?
How about Henry Paulson
Re:Lemme get this straight (Score:5, Informative)
Of all the people who wasted and squandered the money of thousands, if not millions, nobody did time in prison, the only person who did was actually not stealing from decent people but from the thieves, and for THAT he goes to jail?
Actually, that's not even entirely accurate. First, he was borrowing open source software. Goldman Sachs liked this because it meant faster development times, which meant faster profits. They didn't re-release modified code, even if it was only a few lines, of course, violating the licensing terms. Parts of the code he was working on he uploaded to an external server, because his company didn't have a proper code versioning system -- there was no way to track changes being made, and so he utilized an open source repository to store changes to chunks of code he was working on. This wasn't publicly available, it was simply put "in the cloud".
Unfortunately for him, overzealous managers and clueless FBI agents didn't understand what any of this meant, and frequently, and horribly, misinterpreted or misunderstood, what their own experts were telling him. His own attempts to explain what he had done weren't any better understood and were perceived as a confession.
This is a story of how law enforcement was criminally stupid, and believed what a middle-manager with no expertise in the subject and about five layers removed from what he was panic-striken over... that some immigrant they hired was "up to no good", when in truth, it was business as usual. Naturally, the FBI swung into action, believing the worst possible thing -- he was a terrorist, he was trying to destroy america, he was some kind of muslim radical... because the software he used was called Subversion, and when you add in terms like delete, modify, copy, remove... suddenly it looks like a bona fide CSI episode full of shadowy men exchanging pen drives with knowing winks and nods and death to america would surely follow if their crack investigative team didn't interrogate the suspects while brainy people in the forensics lab tossed around complex terminology and zoomed in on single pixels before saying "AH HA! We've got you now! This single pixel here proves he was the murderer!"
Criminal. Stupidity. That was the only crime here. It was CSI: FBI Edition... only without the special effects and soundtrack, and by people with their sense of humor surgically removed, rather than having actual personality and interesting dialogue.
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They didn't re-release modified code, even if it was only a few lines, of course, violating the licensing terms.
Ok, I'll pull a "Citation required" card. Please show an OSS license that requires releasing code modifications if you have only just modified a private copy of the code and have not redistributed it. So far as I know, it's usually if you redistribute the software or made a copy publicly available are you to provide the changes.
I mean, is this whole thing a GPL-is-viral kind of blowup on Goldman's part? Does it boil down to Goldman fearing Serge Aleynikov violated GPL (or whatever license) by adding Gold
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Ok, I'll pull a "Citation required" card. Please show an OSS license that requires releasing code modifications if you have only just modified a private copy of the code and have not redistributed it.
Er, this programmer took a copy, made some modification to it, and kept a copy of those modifications for himself. Under the terms of most open source licenses... this is a permissible act that cannot be restricted in any way. Whether he chooses to publish such a modification or not is a secondary issue. This alone should have provided legal immunity from prosecution in this fashion... it is the company in breach of contract, not the employee. Any such NDA signed by the employee would be legally unenforceab
Re:Lemme get this straight (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not conviced your interpretation is correct.
Clearly private copies count as copies otherwise no company would pay for more than one copy of Office.
The GPL is also somewhat quiet on the matter of copies and focuses on distribution. It therefore appears you can copy as freely as you like, it's only distribution which is in any way restricted.
Certainly for private use, you can put in proprietary code, copy it as many times as you like and everything is fine. You just don't have permission to -redistribute- the GPL portion without releasing your changes too.
Setting the ground there, but I suspect we would agree on the above points.
What seems to be the case is that the company (i.e. agents of the company) has added proprietary code. Any entity which is not the company has no right to copy those parts. It seems that "internal" distribution is OK because you're not redistributing to people as private individuals, but to agents of the company acting as a single entity.
IOW the private individual still has no right to copy the code.
IANAL, but this seems to be how the interpretation of it goes. I can't cite any precedent or the applicable law, but no one has ever attempted to uphold the GPL as meaning that internal redistribution meaning that anyone who touches a copy has permission to release it (or that the company has no right to redistribute internally).
Would be great to hear a real lawyer chime in with a completely non-binding opinion.
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And that's worth how long in jail?
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>>the FBI swung into action, believing the worst possible thing -- he was a terrorist, he was trying to destroy america, he was some kind of muslim radical.
OR just because Goldman had enough connections UP THERE, made some phone calls, and had FBI pick him up. All because they wanted to teach the programmer a lesson.
Once federal judges acquited him, they had their friends in the State go after him.
If the State too is forced to acquit him, they will get someone else to go after him.
Let any other employee think twice before leaving the Brotherhood.
In fact NSA is tracking those who are commenting in his favor here and passing the list to Goldman.
With Goldman, anything's possible.
At least the Mafia does their own enforcement instead of squandering government resources.
Re:Lemme get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
You're surprised that banks almost get away with murder and have a fall guy take the blame? This stuff has been going on at _least_ since 2001.
- - -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Birkenfeld [wikipedia.org]
In October 2001, Birkenfeld began working at UBS in Geneva, Switzerland, handling private banking, primarily for clients located in the United States. In 2005, he learned that UBS's secret dealings with American customers violated an agreement the bank had reached with the IRS.
He resigned from UBS in October 2005 and provided written whistleblower complaints to Peter Kurer, Head Counsel for UBS, and other UBS senior executives regarding the illegal practices of U.S. cross-border business.
He is the first person to expose what has become a multi-billion dollar international tax fraud scandal over Swiss private banking.[2] Despite his unprecedented, extensive and voluntary cooperation, and registering as an IRS whistleblower, Birkenfeld is the only U.S. citizen to be sentenced to jail as a result of the scandal.
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The fundamental problem is that the majority of people just don't give a crap about Accountability and Transparency and would rather watch their (un)reality TV so they don't have to think or do about how the government -- which is an extension of themselves -- is screwing up one of the greatest nations.
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the only person who did was actually not stealing from decent people but from the thieves, and for THAT he goes to jail?
He did not even steal from the thieves, but was merely incredibly naive. Using a subversion repository outside of his workplace, not for stealing the code, but simply because it was more expedient to do it like that than going through the corporate bureaucracy to set one up internally...
An blue-eyed innocent error which would go unpunished at a telecom, but not at a paranoid financial company...
Reminds me of the 'range check' patent war (Score:2)
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What baffles me is the stupidity involved. First the poor sap who got jailed. I NEVER take any code with me between two gigs. I NEVER even take my personal notes with me. I tell them to change my passwords the moment I'm through the door. And I do a clean sweep on all my private equipment. While I do have my own tool kit I do inform my employers that this is mine, it will stay mine and I will never charge them to use it in whatever way th
Dumbass Slashdot Editors (Score:2, Insightful)
"Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging "
Goldman Sachs can bring criminal charges? Really?
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It wouldn't surprise me at all if they could.
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well you can too, if you claim that someone stole something from you... even if it was just ideas, or an algorithm or.. thing is, they couldn't even define what he "stole".. it certainly wasn't money or anything tangible.
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> well you can too, if you claim that someone stole something from you...
If YOU personally did this, your local police department and the FBI would likely IGNORE you. They may or may not even humor you about taking the charges seriously. They may tell you to your face that they "aren't going to bother".
When you have a lot of money to throw around and a senator or two in your pocket, THEN they listen to you.
Wrong reasoning (Score:3)
You're assume Goldman Sachs cares about "is this legal?" or "is this right?". What they care is: "will this improve our PR?", "will this scare people from going against us?", "will this scare people from working for us?".
Seryozha was at that point no longer working for Goldman Sachs, and he dared to do something hostile, so he was an enemy who needed to be punished. Extra bonus for telling the masses "another crooked banker in jail" which makes the uninformed feel as if there's a shred of justice left.
Re:Wrong reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assume Goldman Sachs cares about "is this legal?" or "is this right?". What they care is: "will this improve our PR?", "will this scare people from going against us?", "will this scare people from working for us?".
This is the whole reasons corporations worked to try to make "non-compete" agreements enforceable: to lock in their control of an employee.
And that is why non-compete clauses or agreements are no longer enforceable in California. California did a good thing for a change.
They need to get it through their heads that they do not control the contents of a mind. If they want somebody to "not compete", then the PROPER way to do it is to give them better pay and compensation than the other guy. That's called capitalism.
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"I think if you owned a company your opinion would change very rapidly."
No, I would not. Period.
Keep in mind that a "non-compete" agreement is NOT THE SAME as protection for your "intellectual property". They are 2 different things.
"What they state is if I work at Microsoft on search engine technology. I can't work at Google next week."
I know what they say. I'm not an idiot. I've signed them in the past... and refused to sign them, more recently.
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I think if you owned a company your opinion would change very rapidly.
I agree with Jane Q. Public. I wouldn't change my mind over such a thing. There's always adequate countermeasures even in the absence of no compete.
The fact that California made this non enforcible means the state is dead last if I wanted to start a .com. How do I know employees wont steal my ideas?
Because that theft opens up whatever business employs them to lawsuits from you, even if the theft was relatively minor.
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The fact that California made this non enforcible means the state is dead last if I wanted to start a .com. How do I know employees wont steal my ideas?
If your great idea suddenly stops working when it is revealed to someone else, then it's fundamentally flawed. Anyone "stealing" it would still have to implement both the technical and business sides of it himself, unless he actually steals the implementations from you (in which case you have something to sue with). Just do it better, or lose the competition. Or have them sign an NDA with a nice big penalty.
Pfffft (Score:3)
Being called a crook by Goldman Sachs is like being called an anti-Semite by Hitler!
now we know (Score:2)
fta...
" “The whole point of the Internet is to abstract the physical location of the server from its logical address.”
so *that's* the point...finally!
and for all this time i've thought its for lolcats and pr0n...
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Hrm... now considering the intersection of a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles, one for lolcats and the other for pr0n.
Lolcat pr0n - It's more than just Ceiling Cat watching you masturbate.
He was obviously guilty... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just wait for other plcaes to try this BS (Score:2)
BOB if you don't work 80 hours week we can give you put in lock up for taking all the stuff that you know about us in your head out side of this office and there will no more OT pay.
NO (Score:2)
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Goldman Sachs didn't charge him with anything the state charged him.
The state is merely an instrument of our financial-pharmaceutical-defense-burgerflippial complex.
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Yes, but the parent is still correct.
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Time for Tech / IT unions (Score:3)
Some places have gone way to far and works have no one to stand up for them and even quitting can be seen as planting an time bomb even if all it is stuff that you do day to day that after you quit does not happen and it's leads to an big fail.
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IT highly paid? What drugs are you taking?
Morale of the story (Score:3)
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Always get a lawyer before talking to the law.
No, the moral of the story is: become well connected (too big to fail/jail) and don't get caught.
That's a bit like saying "Become rich", easier said than done. But the parent poster is correct when he says "Don't talk to the law". It can do nothing to help you, and as the police will tell you when they arrest you, anything you say can and will be used against you".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc [youtube.com]
It's a motherfucking joke (Score:2)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216 [rollingstone.com]
Says it all.
I used to agree with them... (Score:2)
But I'm in two minds. The old rationale was that code is just code, and he was merely getting his hands on something he could have typed out himself given enough time. Which is probably true. The guy's an expert, and he knows how the thing works, so maybe he's saving himself a few weeks of work (In fact, he says he wasn't even going to use it...). I don't buy the whole thing about gaining an advantage in the market and all that. Whatever strengths and weaknesses are in GS's system would be clear to any expe
Moral of the story... (Score:2)
DO NOT work as a programmer for the Financial world. Screw those crooks, let them rot and die in technology hell.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
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What? It is possible to put your password on the command line with subversion, but why would you do that if you are going to delete your history? Why not just let subversion prompt for a password (or use a keyring to store it)?
I've deleted my bash history after inadvertently or purposely typing a password into a command line -- sometimes putting the password on the command line is the most expedient way to get work done, despite it being a bad idea from a security standpoint -- and sometimes I'll mistype a hostname on an ssh command, but have already typed my password or ssh key passphrase and it ends up being entered as a command (good thing I never user "rm -rf /" as a password). Well, rather than delete the whole history, I u
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That's also a good password policy and that kind of Pavlovian conditioning can be quite useful.
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According to the TFA Aleinikov had admin rights on the GS systems, which is not surprising considering is responsibilities. If he wanted to cover something malicious he had both the access and the skills to do it.
Even if he has admin rights on the normal production servers, only their internal audit department should have admin rights on the logging servers.
The big bankers' myth of value. (Score:2)
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Any libertarians going to defend GS? (Score:2)
free subversion repository? (Score:2)
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They are a very strange neo-feudalistic bunch where the execs have to frequently take their wives and kids to a new equivalent of Versailles to remain at their level in the pecking order. Normal rules of sanity do not apply from top to bottom.
Justice (Score:4, Interesting)
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No, it isn't zero.
Rajat Gupta, ex GS board member is serving time.
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No, it isn't zero.
Rajat Gupta, ex GS board member is serving time.
That's like arresting one Mafioso and claiming you've destroyed organized crime.
Some practices (Score:2)
But for system logins, particularly if they're *NI/UX systems - you just do SSH keys. No passwords in the clear and auto-login if the host is in your Authorized_Keys files.
However the think about Goldman taking open source software, modifying it and then refusing to re-submit it runs into some serious GPL issues.
Two-tiered justice at its best. (Score:2)
great article (Score:2)
read TFA (realy!), makes me so angry! many lessons to be learned from it, but respect for the law ain't one of them.
The French Connection connection (Score:3)
Incompetence or something else (Score:3)
Should we have tech jurys and more jury pay (Score:2)
First off jury pay is slow that for some people it costs more to go to jury duty then it pays.
also who really want to be on a long trial when you can make more working at mcdonalds then the jury pays?
Now for big tech based trails do you really want AOL's, people who fail for the geek squad up sells / monster cables and others to judge on stuff that is way over there head.
Does Betteridge's law of headlines always apply? (Score:3)
PS. Note how the title of this post is also a question.
Give the man a medal! (Score:2)
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Might just be nit-picking ...
Worse, you're making a distinction without a difference.
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Yes and no. A private individual can in some places petition a Grand Jury to bring an indictment, without the prosecutor being involved, or even knowing about it.
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The US justice system is stupid as is specia
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First you have to scan it in (you may have to flatten it out to get it to fit through the ADF).
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Surely a jury of "your peers" should understand what you do. Cases that involve technology should have juries that have some understanding of technology ...
My thoughts exactly. I shudder to think what other professions have to suffer through. Just imagine all those malpractice suits...
The only profession that seems to be fairly safe is lawyers. Go figure.