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Alibaba Engineers Fired for Mooncake Hacking (wsj.com)
On the eve of Mid-Autumn Festival, some people will go to great lengths to get mooncakes, the traditional gift for family, friends and colleagues. At Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., four engineers tried to rig the distribution system of the e-commerce giant's mooncake selloff -- and were fired for their effort (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source), reports WSJ. From the report: Alibaba confirmed it fired the four this week, after they hacked into the internal website that allows employees to purchase the company's signature mooncakes, with an orange fluffy Alibaba mascot inside. The Hangzhou-based company allocates one free box to each employee for the holiday, and sells extras on the site at cost -- 59 yuan (about $9) for a box of four.
Would it have killed them to put a picture of a mooncake in the article? Am I the only one who doesn't know what the hell they are talking about?
Enigma
moonpies are poison. R C Cola is the antidote
Mooncakes are serious business in Asian culture. Don't fuck with the mooncakes!
Asia is like America: It's ok if companies do it, but don't you DARE to do it yourself.
*sniff* Those commies learned capitalism so fast... they're almost better at it by now than us.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Alibaba was founded on the principle of "screw the American Devil". The programmers in diverting the mooncakes to themselves were only living up to that principle. It seems to me that their cheat was in complete sync with Alibaba policy and ideals.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This story is a classic example of a bad submission, and there is absolutely no way in hell that it worked its way out here to the front page from the firehose without some kind of manipulation.
Not only are we left to wonder what a mooncake is, which is not so bad really as we can look it up, but we're left to wonder why we should care about Alibaba's annual mooncake sale which we've never heard of before. Not linking mooncake to WP is dumb, but not linking "annual mooncake sale" to a page which explains what it is to us is just goddamned stupid.
I thought Slashdot was going to be different now... better. But it's just the same shitstorm of slashvertisements and no editing. That's still enough to keep me coming around, but I'm now never going to believe any bullshit about improvements.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Having traveled in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, I actually knew exactly what a mooncake was. It was interesting to me to see some of the "What's a mooncake?" posts given how I'm all the time seeing articles here on subjects I've never heard of, like the latest programming language de jour which is apparently one million times more awesome and useful than every other language that ever came before it.
By the way, most mooncakes aren't very delicious, at least not according to my white boy American tastes. The ones that probably are delicious rarely if ever make to the USA. Even a good friend in Taiwan told me recently that she doesn't like mooncakes much at all. So if you didn't know what it was, you might not think you were missing much if you actually had a chance to try one.
*gasp*
Not only have they learned Capitalism but also colonialism, practically at the same time!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
how hard is it to bake a cake?!
When Chinese hackers breech American military and corporate security to steal priceless information and technology, it's a tragedy. When Chinese hackers breech Chinese security to steal cheap snacks, it's news.
You are a culture appropriator
Reading other accounts of the story (I expected better from you, WSJ!), the server was not hacked. Instead there was a buy button on a web page, and these engineers wrote javascript in a web browser to click the button for them. I'm not clear on the exact technical details (the articles and posts did not detail them), but it sounds like you could keep clicking the buy button via javascript to get lots of orders.
While no one was looking, 4 Chinese engineers stole 400 cakes. That's as many as 40 tens, and that's terrible.
So, you assumed that, since China's population is 1/5th of the world's population, that if you posted an article about a Chinese cultural thing, there'd be at least a 20% chance that a reader would know what you were talking about. Now, not that I don't see why you'd THINK that...