Arrest in Cisco Code Theft

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "The BBC is reporting that an arrest has been made in the case of the stolen Cisco code that was posted to the internet last May. Approximately 800 MB was posted to a Russian security website. No name has been released and details are rather thin."

Comments

Re:Open Source

[Deanalator]

"Heaven forbid that Cisco actually allow this and join the open source movement...we certainly wouldn't want their stuff to get any better. (*insert sarcasm here*)"

It might interest you to know that cisco is one of the top contributers (of both hardware, and money) to the Open Source Development Labs.

Also even if cisco did release the code for its routers, it's architecture is so specialized that you need quite expensive machinery to even get it compiled, so it wouldn't enjoy the massive development base that linux has.

Re:"Code theft"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Theft does not mean you were not deprived of something.

o rly?

theft

\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.

Re:napalm smells like victory

[teko_teko]

If you actually read the article, you'll find out that the person arrested was a British.

Re:Reuters: source code lifted from Cisco corp net

[_Sprocket_]

From ITWorld:

Malicious hackers made off with code for versions 12.3 of IOS after the thief compromised a Sun Microsystems Inc. server on Cisco's network, then briefly posted a link to the source code files on a file server belonging to the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, according to Alexander Antipov, a security expert at Positive Technologies, a security consulting company in Moscow.

Re:"Code theft"???

[RealAlaskan]

Theft is theft...

Yes indeed, it is. And unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials is ... Follow this closely, now, it's tricky ... unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. It's not theft at all. That's why there's a different law, with a different name.

Whats the difference between taking something that isn't yours and taking something that isn't yours.

The difference is that when it's theft, what the owner had is somehow diminished. When it's unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, the only thing which is diminished is the artificial monopoly the owner has been granted for a limited time. I'd say that's a huge, meaningful difference.

When you steal Joe's hamburger, you are better off, Joe is worse off, and the rest of us are unaffected. When you commit unauthorized distribution of Joe's copyrighted materials, Joe may or may not be worse off, you are better off, and so are the rest of us.

Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials is not always immoral (though, by definition, it's always illegal). If Joe has somehow violated the social contract which brought him the monopoly, that unauthorized distribution should be done by the government which granted the monopoly in the first place. There's no reason to think that's the case here, with Cisco's stuff, of course.

Re:Open Source

[afidel]

Um, last time I worked on it IOS was built using the Sun compiler chain on Solaris servers. Our local IOS repository was a 16 way SunFire running Rational Clear Case and the compile machine was a 4 way SunFire with faster CPU's running a glued together compile chain. They were working towards supporting GNU toolchain two years ago but it was slow going since the IOS toolchain had always been Solaris based.