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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."
The United States was mighty competitive with Great Britain around the turn of the last century.
Same game, different faces.
Huh? Different faces?
so if you're gonna rant about H-1B visas, don't bother.
I suppose you can rant about legal immigration in general, if you want.
I thought this would be a fine example of the problems with H1-B workers, but the phrase "49-year-old Chunlai Yang, who is a naturalised US citizen," kept coming up in news articles about the arrest, so I had to give it up.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Because he's Chinese, in light of our MacArthur-style political climate.
The evidence against him includes screen captures showing Yang in the act of copying source code files to removable drives from his laptop.
Sounds like another Wen Ho Lee.
Yup, this is marginally off topic, I admit, but it illustrates private corporation software going to foreign government entitites.
During the Clinton years the Secretary of Commerce forced some companies to sell software to Libya (known for software piracy) for proprietary oil operations (I can't say what) under the threat of federal prosecution if they did not do so.
This amounts to forced transfer of proprietary software, though not including original source code.
I do not think people realize what political deals behind the scenes do to US company's proprietary property when the US government decides to do "Let's make a deal" with foreign dictators that can't be trusted.
This is obviously an attempt by the US to sabotage the Chinese economy by getting them to engage in the same kind of economic masturbation that the US does. Do we really want Chinese physicists working on new technologies when ours are at the stock exchanges? If they do that they clean our clocks and completely dominate us.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Not the ...
if( traderID.isInsider() )
trade.execute();
else
tradeDelayQueue.push(trade);
... code snippet!
Have gnu, will travel.
The Nixon Doctrine: It's not illegal if the President does it, or orders it done.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The Chinese Government has a policy known as the 'Thousand Grains of Sand' where each citizen is encouraged to bring back a little something from overseas if they can. Then one of the hundreds of thousands of state officials implementing this policy will see what the person brought back and dole out any appropriate reward. This is why Chinese citizens (and some Chinese descended citizens who return to the motherland) are being caught all over the World doing this sort of stuff (eg. in New Zealand Chinese regularly get caught stealing agricultural samples that our higher-value export industries are based on). While anyone can be a criminal, I can't think of any other country in the modern age where this is officially sanctioned.
China wants to be number one in the World, and perhaps they will get there, but it seems an awful shame they're so determined to do so that they are quite unethical (from the majority of the rest of the World's point of view). This is not meant to be a bashing of China, or of Chinese citizens, just an explanation of why these events are becoming more frequent for those unaware of the official Chinese Government policy that encourages behavour considered criminal elsewhere. The Chinese Government will smile at you while robbing your house behind your back (although this is nothing compared to how they treat their own citizens).
obPedant: It's Wacker Drive, not Wall Street. Completely different city, too.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
In the past the USSR would steal all the technology it could mostly because they lacked the money to develop their own and the Cold War denied them a good way to develop their own stuff, so they just stole it when they could due to lack of alternatives. The Chinese are flush with cash but they are just lazy. It's much quicker to steal something than to develop it yourself, even when you've got the means to do so. An entire generation of Chinese people are being put to work in their system looking for shortcuts like this. You can steal a fish today from the guy next to you who knows how to fish and thereby feed yourself, but what happens tomorrow when he doesn't come to the river and you don't know how to catch fish yourself?
Yeah, you're right, that's completely different. Fat-cat commodities gamblers in Chicago are nothing at all like the ones in NYC.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Why don't we just summarily shoot these people for espionage? Or do they get a free pass because they're from big, bad, scary China?
There's a very simple way to deal with China's aggressive, abusive 'Thousand Grains of Salt' campaign: brutally crack down on Chinese spies, and deal with perpetrators mercilessly.
Also, the software was taken from the Exchange, not the investors. Investors pay to have their trades made through the Exchange. The Exchange just facilitates the transaction. CME is more like the casino, not the gamblers.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Fix typo. trying to beat crowd in posting. Got names mixed up. But you get the idea.
Is that so much worse than the US using the CIA and NSA to wiretap and bug foreign companies to steal trade secrets for US companies? (search for "Published cases")
Donate free food here
send him to a federal pound me in the ass prison!
Because the average American cannot believe their lying eyes that China is now starting to go around the world much like the British Empire in advancing its own interests, building its power, subverting local governments and even yes colonizing (how many Americans know that China is exporting surplus population to Africa to help it acquire resources). Stupid Americans make comments about how we can't rush to judgment that Chinese might be more dangerous than other ethnic groups to hire for sensitive positions, despite the fact that it's public knowledge that their government aggressively engages in and encourages industrial espionage. They have a crowdsourcing program for intelligence (of all types) gathering, for fuck's sake.
But oh no, it's just those evil right-wing extremists and union workers who think China is a serious threat to our people and way of life. Everyone knows they're just a large asian version of Mexico.
It's a little more complicated than that... CME has a discussion of their match algorithms on pages 42 through 52 of their electronic trading documentation:
http://www.cmegroup.com/globex/files/ElectronicTradingConcepts.pdf
Not that it's necessarily that much harder in principle to implement 10 relatively-simple algorithms, but when you add requirements for performance/latency into the mix it doesn't seem that surprising that there would be some trade secrets in there somewhere.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
You stole our code which rigged the markets so a few can benefit.
How dare you!
Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Buying: I give you money, you give me property.
Selling: You give me money, I give you property.
For an exchange, repeat many times a day for lots of people.
If there is anything more complicated, I want to know about it.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I know a number of highly skilled people who have lost their jobs in recent years. Some due to office politics, but mostly it was a combination of downsizing and outsourcing. These folks had some serious knowledge. Management should have considered the consequences of sending these people out the door in search of employment. Let's just say I have seen some spectacular malfunctions of management strategy that I dare not mention in a public forum. Relying on a non-disclosure or non-compete agreement is not much protection when the ultimate sanction (loss of job) is already off the table. If the ex-employee goes to China, good luck with that non-compete agreement.
IT culture has deteriorated to the point where most employees have a "doomsday" thumb drive with all kinds of information that might be helpful at their next job. With nearly 20% of the work force effectively unemployed and the other 80% paranoid about their future, confidentiality is going to be a scarce commodity.
At the upper levels of management, there are golden parachutes for a terminated CEO, CFO, CIO, etc. In return for enough cash to sit back and carefully choose their next job, the quid pro quo is that secrets remain secret. At that level, the problem is acknowledged and solved with money. But there are a lot of secrets at all levels of management these days, and employers seem to be surprised when things leak.
You can write it again.... ooops.. you don't need to write it again. Is unfair, but is like stealing some customized pants that only work for you. It will be a disavengate to try to use these pants.
-Woof woof woof!
Come on, I thought this was News for Nerds.
Dumb ones are caught...
1. Steal code
2. Write trading code that cheats the system
3. Profit
Typical Slashdot joke. Except we know what step two is, and a foreign government may be both directly and indirectly supporting the manipulation. The real world isn't quite so funny;.
Why is Snark Required?
I'm not authorized to name names, but the software was essential to the refining of oil into finished products. Anyone in the industry can guess which of a couple companies that might be.
I can tell you that the firm that had to "turn over" the software, made sure that the code didn't have all the trade secrets in it.
The damnable government highjinks are actually undermining our country's companies, which means our jobs. It is our jobs that get lost when these "giveaways" occur because some political deal happens.
It is true marxist sickness, where the government tells companies to screw themselves and the company has to say back "Fine, now where do you want me to put the screw into myself and how deep?" Kill the Golden Goose and...you kill the employees.
Oh, and guess what then happened to the software that went to Libya?
Programmers who rely on income from their customers will expect this.
Suddenly the company who had to "give" the software to Libya started to get calls for software support from all sorts of places through the Mid-East and elsewhere in the world.
So much honesty and trust in the MidEast. Why it must absolutely be nirvana.
If the market were fair and open, this kind of thing wouldn't even be possible, because everyone would already know what code runs in the servers. It's the opacity that allows information asymmetry which gets us into trouble every time by enabling market manipulation.
All trades should be batch processed, every 5 minutes, and all this high-frequency scamming should be pulled out by the root. An open, honest, well regulated market is in the best interest of all investors.
Putting Source Code for a major exchange in foreign hands is delivering information that can be useful for strategic electronic attacks. In the modern era, such espionage should be considered treasonous.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The CME group is the exchange, not the "Wall Street gamblers" you are vilifying. Yes, they're both in the finance industry. No, they are not the same.