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.
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
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...
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 NSA will always win due to having the lowest ping times.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
A person steals employer's source code to seed it's own startup. Happens all the time. Why is this a news?
1) They got caught. /. readers.
2) They are getting prosecuted.
3) (It get's attention HERE because) Coders are a significant fraction of
4) It WAS both illegal and immoral don'tchaknow. (And unethical to boot!) Some misguided people care about things like that. They are called "Suckers"... I mean, "Not Sociopaths".
Ah, I see, because it's about the "Wall street". A sure way to get plenty of attention on /.
5) Well, I suppose there are still a few people a smidge upset over the 2009 crash. You know, blaming Wall Street gamblers and big banks for the loss of jobs, life-styles, and life-savings. (While the big firms and their COs still managed to rack up record pay and bonuses.) Petty grudges to be sure, but some people just can't let anything go. *rolls eyes*
A person steals employer's source code to seed it's own startup. Happens all the time. Why is this a news?
This is quite an indictment modern business practices. You do know that doing those things that "Happens all the time" are the shameful acts of a parasite. Not just a parasite on society, but a parasite on the business world. Defined as a "person" who lives off the work of others, and that adds nothing of value to the system it benefits from. Like the banks that buy up oil just to take it off the market, and so create an artificial scarcity that drives the price up. Except they don't actually STEAL anything, that I'm aware of.
THINK! It's patriotic
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