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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.
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.
No, he actually bought it... at bargain basement prices because he didn't tell Tim Paterson that he had IBM as a customer.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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...
A small company clean-roomed an existing DOS, and Gates bought that--for $75k. Technically speaking it wasn't arbitrage because it wasn't immediately flipped to IBM and there was some assumed risk that nobody would buy it. OTOH, he definitely bought cheaply in one market and sold dearly in another--one of the greatest trades of all time.
Exploiting the difference between ethical and legal for the betterment of one's hip pocket. The American Corporate Dream.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
I sure do hope you plan on selling your house for no more than what you paid for it. Anything else would be unethical.
Hint: The summary usually has links in it that you can click on that will direct your browser to something called an article. There you can find answers to many of the most bewildering questions that many slashdot "readers" have...
With the state of modern journalism, you can't necessarily trust the contents of the linked article.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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! --
They got their start writing a Basic interpreter for the MITS Altair. Bill and Paul had access to a PDP-10 at school. And their Basic looks a lot like the Basic I remember from my PDP days.
And then Bill got on his high horse about people stealing 'his' Basic.
Have gnu, will travel.
The difference between ethical and legal is also called the "profit margin".
Way to go! You totally decapitated that straw man!
I'm sure when you sell your house you'll be the one that doesn't tell anyone you know there's termites, and you didn't get them treated just to make sure you wouldn't have to.
Remember when Avanti was created by stealing Cadence's source code, complete with bugs?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
There's also the dumpster diving stuff but that was a university. Thus Microsoft BASIC and Applesoft BASIC were born. The Paterson stuff came later.
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
I'm not sure why a capital gain is in any way equivalent to a hidden defect. Probably because it isn't, they're two entirely different things.
Both examples are full of bugs though, I'll concede that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
The difference between ethical and legal is also called the "profit margin"
Love it. I think I'll drop that into my .sig , and maybe even put it on some of my campaign material.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Yeah, I think GP was conflating DOS and BASIC.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Connections, not Code will fetch investments in Wall Street Firms. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=199423
Casteism