Slashdot Mirror
Wall Street Traders Charged With Copying Code To Start Their Own Company
coondoggie writes "Talk about starting a business on shaky ground. The Manhattan District Attorney's office says former Wall Street traders stole electronic trading source code and data from their then trading firm in an effort to start up their own financial business."
Sending yourself pilfered code through your company email account is probably not the wisest plan.
to send all these bastards to prison for the longest time possible.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Vuu, Lu and another former Flow Traders worker, Glen Cressman, all have been charged with unlawful duplication of computer-related material and unauthorized use of secret scientific material.
As one who maintains code for the securities industry, calling it "scientific" is an insult to science.
There will always be idiots out to make a quick buck, without much concern for legality. Nice when it actually catches up with them.
Wall St is all about gaming the markets to steal from people. They use techniques to illegally creating spikes in stock prices, as well as depressions of stock prices, to permit themselves to constantly buy low, sell high. Meanwhile your average Joe has no idea that the system is rigged in this way and wonders why he keeps losing money in the stock market.
Have they been charged with stealing code. Or charged with Stealing Code - Meaning that they dared create some competition for entrenched interests and are being slapped with frivolous charges to strangle the upstart company? In that part of town the police seem to have little trouble arresting whoever bankers point their fingers at.
A new low from the owners of Slashdot. It is incredibly common practice for the former "owners" of wage slaves to use their political clout to have said former wage slaves charged with various crimes, when they leave their "master" and set up a competing enterprise. Are the accusations ever warranted? On far fewer occasions than you may imagine, but even when the accusations are proven FALSE and MALICIOUS, the damage is done, the target is destroyed, and the company responsible for bringing the phoney lawsuit never faces punishment or sanction.
So why is Slashdot pushing this "presumed guilty" crap. Could it be something to do with the surnames of the accused?
But it explains why the stole the code: They obviously do not have what it takes to write their own....
Side note: I have worked with some pretty locked down notebooks from jobs at customer-sites, and there was always an easy and untraceable way to export data, and I did not even try hard. Only exception so far is a job my boss did where he was not allowed to remove the computer from a locked room and had to leave all his own electronics outside. Of course I only ever used it to export data that I would be allowed to export anyways (but where that would be painful in the official way), or not at all (stumbled over it by accident, just copied a few freshly created test-files). But basically, if you have access to the physical hardware, can take it home and can boot it up, run software and write simple code (shell-scripts/word macros are quite enough), you have won, no matter how locked down the thing is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Sending yourself pilfered code through your company email account is probably not the wisest plan.
The bright side is the NSA used the code to make enough money to pay for their company picnic this year.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Sending yourself pilfered code through your company email account is probably not the wisest plan.
Depends what your goal is. Now, everyone has backups of that code: NSA, China, Russia... I'm sure these algorithms will perform well when put against each other.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Bill Gates borrowing some code from a small computer company, then starting his own business to sell the OS?
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
The place I used to work for was re-engineering the C++ Source code of their biggest client, rewriting it into Java, and calling it their own... It was basically an improved rip off of the customer's system, that the customer had paid them to develop in the first place. In my view, they where stealing their own best customer's intellectual property.
When I found out about it I asked "Can you legally DO that?" They insisted that it was fine... I didn't last 3 more months there and ended up quitting in the midst of a huge office blowup. I should have known a lot sooner it would not end well. Had I quit sooner I might have not needed to hire a lawyer to defend myself from their lawsuit against me. (Which they didn't win.) They eventually went into business that competed directly with their customer.
Some people have no ethics or morals. Many don't get caught, some do. Where I was able to prove they broke the law in their dealings with me, they never got caught by their best customer to my knowledge. I'm just LUCKY not to work there anymore. Those guys where NOT people you want to work for...
There is a fundamental problem with "pilfered code", or re-stated, "intellectual property".
Logic/functions/procedures/programs are binary math expressions.
Digital media is a string of Digits... a number.
It's odd that bought laws can claim ownership to equations and their constituent numbers themselves.
Greedy Gangsters Grabbing at ether wind.
The problem is that most trading firm code is actually Open Source software that was ripped off in the first place.
Proprietary? Um, no.
Never believe an exec at a trading firm. Ever.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Remember when Avanti was created by stealing Cadence's source code, complete with bugs?
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There are Wall Street traders that are unethical?
2 groups of drug dealers shooting each other in the street and taking each other out. As long as no one else gets caught in the crossfire, I'm OK with it.
There is no software available to game the system. However if they stole software that would help them connect and set up a trading service that would compete with others then you'll see stuff like this start to fly. Wall Street hates competition and know how to toss false allegations to rile up the mobs. The ignorant mobs getting all indignant are the slashdotters here. Don't let wall street frame a couple of people so easily. Ask what it was they emailed and if they can't tell you then treat it like the BS it is.
I'm shocked, they are the most ethical bunch of crooks we know, after all we trust them with billions of dollars every day, what could go wrong?
I bet they could learn a thing or two from Snowden.
Somewhat reminiscent of cisco's start.
will steal ANYTHING from anybody.
"Sending yourself pilfered code through your company email account is probably not the wisest plan."
apparently sending ANYTHING through e-mail period is not the wisest plan, either.
I worked at a place where they fired the developer who had written most of the code that was running the company. They let him go back to his desk to clear his stuff and he then decided to also start uploading the full code base to his personal home server. He had an arch enemy developer who noticed the traffic and busted him on it. The owners called the cops who showed up and made him delete the code with his arch enemy looking over his shoulder. He wasn't all in the wrong as the owners had promised him a small percentage of the company never delivered.
A person steals employer's source code to seed it's own startup. Happens all the time. Why is this a news?
/.
Ah, I see, because it's about the "Wall street". A sure way to get plenty of attention on
Unless you encrypt it.
# to do: perl joke goes here
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Theft of trade secrets.
Large customer contact lists can be very lucrative a director level contact at [Large Jobsite] told me that some people had left with the entire [REDACTED] candidate list and went to a competitor they apparently got paid a lot for this data.
...that this is a criminal and not a civil case.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
If the software is GPL, you're perfectly free to modify and use it privately - it's only when you distribute the software that you have an obligation to also distribute the source code. BSD and similar licenses have no restrictions whatsoever, so you can use them how you like.
AFAIK, you retain copyright on the delta changes from the original software too.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Wow, employees with Asian backgrounds stealing secrets from Western companies? What a surprise!
Back in the dot com boom, a friend told me about a company he had worked for that built up a number of software products that represented the company's intellectual property. When the dot com went bust the company went bankrupt. When the writing was on the wall, the management of the company formed another company and bought up the best of the IP. Then they started again.
No, it's not right. The Investors should be the owners of the property or at least compensated rather than managers sneaking in and grabbing it. Maybe there should be laws or something to stop this. But it does happen and it is what it is.
I never believed I'd say this, but I'm grateful I'm getting too old for this b. s.. Best of fortune with it, though. I wish you do a better job defending your comfort with the next creation of technology than we've done with the present one.
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"sometimes changed the file format of the attachments to make it difficult to recognize their contents, according to the complaint."
Or did he just use tgz because that's what people use? I can't say whether there was any crime here, but there is a strong tendency for prosecutors to way overstate the meaning of routine actions the same way cops will claim any movement is furtive after they have frisked or shot someone. It is boilerplate BS.
Connections, not Code will fetch investments in Wall Street Firms. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=199423
Casteism