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UCLA Shooter Accused Victim Of Stealing His Computer Code

The gunman who shot and killed a UCLA professor on Wednesday has been identified as Mainak Sarkar, said Los Angeles police. Sarkar, a former doctoral student accused the vicitim William Klug, 39, of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else. According to reports, Sarkar used a 9mm semiautomatic pistol to shoot the professor, and then turned the gun on himself. A March 10 blog post by Sarkar, now archived reads: William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy. [...] My name is Mainak Sarkar. I was this guy's PhD student. We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it another student. He made me really sick. Your enemy is your enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust.

11 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. UC: students own the copyrights in their works by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    From the UCLA copyright information: "At UC, students generally own the copyrights in their creative works, including theses and dissertations. Any works produced by a registered student without the use of university funds (other than Student Financial Aid) is the intellectual property of the student."

    But we don't (yet?) know what really went down.

    1. Re:UC: students own the copyrights in their works by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Informative

      "Any works produced by a registered student without the use of university funds (other than Student Financial Aid) is the intellectual property of the student."

      That's likely more aimed at undergrads. Grad students working with a faculty member are probably doing so while receiving funding as an RA.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
  2. Re:Mental illness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well damn fool write some more code... your code is not like bodily fluids it is not that precious.

    In Engineering and Computer Science, code is quite valuable, particularly in PhD programs where the requirement is to demonstrate 5-10% new information as part of the program and do it within 6 years.

    Depending on the complexity of the work.. the code could potentially be worth a lot of money and taking quite a few years to perfect.

  3. Re:Wow, a page from the Valery Fabrikant by lgw · · Score: 4, Informative

    The UCLA shooter, Mainak Sarkar, apparently had a list he was working his way down. His ex girlfriend has been found dead, and was on his list. He's a Muslim from India, BTW, though Islam seems to be a coincidence for once.

    Of course, it's still early, and more details always come to light in the week following a shooting, but this really looks like a guy settling all his grudges on his way out.

    --
    Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  4. Re:the dark side of arduino by quantaman · · Score: 4, Informative

    https://arduinohistory.github....

    worth a read. I had no idea massimo stole the idea from his student.

    I think a lot less of massimo now, sad to say. yeah, he messed up the top .1 spaced headers (a crime in itself) but taking a student's work and calling it your own, that's really something to be publicly shamed over.

    and yet, massimo does world tours claiming he's the arduino inventor guy.

    just read the student's post about how HE came up with the concepts and had it stolen from him. I feel for him and I can imagine that happening, too.

    The student may have gotten shafted in the history though I'm not sure it's right to say his work was stolen.

    The student master's project consisted of creating a platform called Wired, this platform was released as open source.

    The supervisor, who certainly had some significant input and guidance on the project, forked the Wired project and turned it into Arduino. This is a completely standard and proper thing to do with open source projects, heck I've done it. There are two different visions for the project, forking means that both have a chance to succeed, it would seems that Arduino was the more successful vision.

    It could be something similar happened here, though obviously with a bunch of other personal issues added on the part of the shooter. Sarkar was working on a project and had some conflicts with his supervisor. The supervisor decided to put another student on the project. Sarkar felt like his work was being stolen and had some sort of break down.

    It's tragic but I don't see any evidence that the supervisor did anything wrong other than not knowing how to help a student who was in a really bad state.

    --
    I stole this Sig
  5. Re:Wow, a page from the Valery Fabrikant by Flavianoep · · Score: 2, Informative

    There is more violence in Venezuela than in the US, even with guns banned. It's not so simple.

    --
    Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
  6. Re:I wish people would recognize... by KermodeBear · · Score: 4, Informative

    Of note: According to the FBI crime statistics, violent crime has been dropping steadily from 1993 through 2012. Crime, it seems, is not up at all - the media is just covering every single event with breathless desperation to make us think that there's some sort of massive, unheard-of epidemic going on. It's agenda driven, you can be sure.

    I think the USA should be lauded for this kind of progress. There's more work to be done, of course - one shooting is always one too many - but we're definitely on the right trajectory.

    --
    Love sees no species.
  7. Re:Wow, a page from the Valery Fabrikant by dywolf · · Score: 1, Informative

    Chicago is a favorite red herring of the gun nuts that relies on the reader being uninformed about Chicago.

    So read.
    and become informed:
    a) Chicago proper is a rather small area, and guns very easy to get in the surrounding cities that make up the metro area
    b) Chicago isn't even in the top 10 cities for gun violence. The cities that top that list are St Louis, Birmingham, New Orleans, and other red-state cities with far looser gun laws and higher gun availability.
    c) Chicago's gun laws aren't the strictest of any major US city. in fact, by state law (GOP legislature), Chicago actually cannot pass any more gun laws than it already has
    d) NYC's gun laws are even stricter than Chicagos. Its gun violence rate is also lower. This same pattern is repeated in several other gun control heavy cities.
    e) http://www.bloomberg.com/polit...

    --
    The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
  8. Re:What was the code anyways? by m00sh · · Score: 3, Informative

    I just want to know what level of crazy this person really was. Did he really have a novel piece of code, and just didn't know how to deal with the loss. Or are we dealing with a nutcase who saw a fellow student use a linked list the same way he did, and assumed that they must have gotten it from the teacher.

    He was a doctoral student. So, the code was probably few thousand hours of work over 2-3 years of research. Not a trivial homework code.

  9. Top secret project by ghoul · · Score: 1, Informative

    OK if I am the govt and I needed to disappear a few researchers for a top secret project (and one of them insists on taking his girlfriend along) how would I do it?
    Well telling that one shot the other and killed himself would be a good way. Has anyone even seen the bodies? Putting a campus on lockdown is a good way to make sure noone sees the gvot leaving with the guys.
    And then of course you create a soical media back history to paint it as a crazy. But there the govt slipped up by putting up Sarcar's profile as a Muslim. Sarcar is a bengali Surname and probably the intern at the *ia tasked to create the profile just went with Muslim as most Bangladeshis are Muslim but Sarcar is a Hindu surname.

    OK guys how do you like this conspiracy theory. Please find holes in it

    --
    **Life is too short to be serious**
  10. Re:Credit, by ghoul · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have been in Research groups which are full of Indians and Chinese on visas and a few locals and the professor gives the toughest thankless tasks to the Indians and Chinese and the visible conference visits to the locals. What are they gonna do? Go back home after spending thousands of dollars and giving up years of earning potential (note all of these folks are college graduates who could get 6 figure salaries but are working for less than minimum wage as grad students).
    Its not racial- I have seen professors of Indian and Chinese origin do it to Indian and Chinese students and not do it to Indian Origin students who happen to be US born and hence have the right to work off campus.
    The F1 system which prevent folks from working off campus needs to be reformed as it basically traps people into an apprentice system (something the unions fought long and hard against)
    Professors dont treat locals like shit as locals have a choice they can just take up waitressing or taxi driving for the period of time it takes them to find a new advisor(and yes driving taxis pays more than grad research assistantships) and still carry on with their classes whereas a F1 student who loses his/her funding may have to drop out of the program and go back home

    --
    **Life is too short to be serious**