Chicago Mercantile Exchange Secrets Leaked To China

chicksdaddy writes with this excerpt from Threat Post: "A 10 year employee of CME Group in Chicago is alleged to have stolen trade secrets and proprietary source code used to run trading systems for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and passed them to officials in China, where he hoped to set up a software firm to help create electronic exchanges, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Illinois. Chunlai Yang, 49, is alleged to have downloaded "thousands of files" containing "source code and proprietary algorithms" used by CME to run its trading systems. The files were downloaded from a company-owned source code repository maintained by CME to Yang's work computer, then copied them to removable "thumb" drives. The complaint also cites personal e-mail correspondence between Yang and an official in China that contained proprietary CME information."

Comments

Re:Thousand Grains of Sand

[jpapon]

Oh, please. I have no love for the Chinese government, but even I know that this is in no way unique to them.

For as long as there has been property, there have been thieves. The U.S. stole much of its industrial-revolution era technology from the U.K. Europe stole many of the ideas that brought about the renaissance from the Arabs. The Arabs stole much of this engineering knowledge from the Byzantine Romans. They in turn stole from anyone they could lay their blood covered hands on. That's how it works. How can people on Slashdot bitch about software patents, and then complain about Chinese theft of software?

They're ideas, goddamnit. They spread. That's why they're beautiful.