This is not a contract. This is the law. Violating it isn't a contract dispute. It is a criminal offense.
But presumably many/most of the people who were involuntarily detained and intrusively searched weren't committing a criminal offence, so what is the justification for the detention and search?
We shouldn't allow carte blanche intrusions into people's lives in exchange for just doing something that is a normal or even necessary part of those lives such as travelling from place to place or communicating with someone else. It's like saying we should condone arbitrary, abusive security theatre at an airport because terrrsm, and everyone "accepted" that they could be mistreated in those ways by buying a ticket so they have no grounds for complaint.
There would still be patents, copyrights and other IP claims from the big US guys to survive competition.
Not necessarily.
The US grants patents for several relevant fields that wouldn't be recognised or enforceable in many other places. Those patents have little if any value against competition based in one of those other places other than possibly preventing them from selling in the US (which in turn only harms other types of business there who can't benefit from the same competition-driven advantages that everyone else can).
Copyright only protects a specific expression of an idea. It doesn't stop anyone else reimplementing the same idea another way, and it certainly doesn't stop someone implementing a better idea for solving the same underlying problem. This is true even in the US.
And finally, even where IP rights would be practically enforceable abroad, that tends to be so because the US pushes hard in international negotiations to strengthen the protections that favour its home-grown economy. Other governments aren't going to remain as co-operative in those negotiations if their home-grown businesses are starting to compete and so their own economies stand to lose out.
Being seen as pro-US is becoming politically toxic to politicians in a lot of places already, so visibly sticking it to the United States' big business and/or government in these sorts of negotiations has basically no political downside and would more likely boost popularity with the local electorate. I suppose this is just another kind of long term fall-out from the generally offensive/dismissive attitude the US government has shown towards foreigners in recent months, and as with the more direct security concerns, it's not going to do their business world any favours.
That's why there is more than one pilot on a large commercial flight.
Right, but disturbingly often they both fall asleep at the same time:
According to the British Airline Pilots' Association (BALPA), 56 percent of 500 commercial pilots admitted to being asleep while on the flight deck and, of those, nearly one in three said they had woken up to find their co-pilot also asleep.
That's right out of the link I posted above, aside from the emphasis I added.
I'm not sure what you're describing is really anything new, though. High-end network monitoring and performance management tools have been commonplace in enterprise server rooms and data centres for some time. People get all hot and bothered about recent publicity for the NSA and such, but network taps themselves are simple, ubiquitous, and have many useful purposes aside from anything some might regard as shady. It's like the way span ports have been used, but more systematic and with greater capacity and flexibility.
Cisco themselves aren't a particularly big player in these kinds of markets, though. They often provide the heavy network switching and routing infrastructure, but usually it's other vendors who provide management and monitoring tools for various purposes. There's also a small but growing industry that exists just to bridge the gap from the live network to the tools, because you want to run a lot of those tools out-of-band and connect them into your network on demand.
I wouldn't be surprised if all other U.S. companies suffer similar harm, and that's no cause for a party.
For a lot of people and a lot of different reasons, it would be cause for celebration if these markets opened up and weren't dominated by a few giants any more. That's the heart of the problem for the giants.
The related problem for the US government is that new entrants in the markets won't necessary be based in, or even operate in, the United States. Aside from any potential security concerns that might give them, it's going to hit the US tax man right in the spreadsheet.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple all go bankrupt at once because of this.
That is extremely unlikely. What is more plausible, however, is:
1. They continue to lose the confidence of international customers.
2. Those customers seek alternative arrangements that they consider more trustworthy, possibly ad-hoc ones at first.
3. Over time, a new generation of more structured alternatives begins to develop to supply the new market demand, offering similar services and products to the big name US brands.
Some of these may be direct commercial competitors, but that's not really the concern for the current market leaders, because the barrier to entry for anyone trying to compete head-on is huge. Probably the greater risk is collaborative movements, whether Open Source tools or simply a degree of standardisation and compatibility between smaller vendors that means you can build (for example) a heterogenous network using a pool of specialist vendors and have a good chance of it working.
This is potentially toxic to broad US vendors such as Cisco in the networking space or the big cloud services companies who ideally want you to outsource almost your entire IT infrastructure to them alone. Which brings us on to...
4. Even in the US, long-time and lucrative customers start second-guessing whether they still need US IT Brand X, and those brands start losing serious money to both the foreign movements and, over time, also to new competitors in the US who are riding the open/collaboration wave to get a disruptive foothold in the market.
And at that point, the big US vendors are really in trouble.
Emerging markets... likely need enterprise class equipment too.
Well, yes and no, but reportedly 98.9% no in the case of at least one huge deal that fell through.
SDN is coming, and the likes of Cisco are terrified of it. So would you be if your own executives thought it was going to cut your company's value in half and there was little you could do about it.
The main thing they've got left to compete with is the trust in their brand, the idea that they're a safe bet and no-one ever got fired for buying Cisco. They're in trouble even without all the NSA publicity, but if their own government is damaging their established brand, it doesn't exactly help their situation.
Actually, pilots falling asleep at the controls, in some cases both at once, is one of the more genuinely terrifying aspects of modern aviation. It reportedly happens often, and the pilots' unions are vocal about the lack of adequate rest between cockpit hours. The only reason we don't hear more about it is because modern planes are (at the risk of grossly oversimplifying) basically flying themselves for much of their journey, so it's not as if they suddenly fall from the sky if someone dozes off for a couple of minutes mid-journey when there's nothing anywhere nearby.
If I can prove by experiment that can drive more safely while texting than most people with their attention fully focused on the road
I wish more people would actually try that. The reality check would probably shock some of them out of this kind of reckless behaviour, making us all safer.
How about a deal? You take that test, and if you really are safer while texting than most people when they're fully concentrating, you get to keep doing it, completely legally. However, if it turns out that you're actually more dangerous, and we also then know that you're deluded about your own abilities and therefore unable to properly judge how to drive safely within those abilities, you have to give up your licence and never drive again. Fair?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that if you've ever been responsible for sysadmin at all, it was only for a relatively small organisation. If you're responsible for a large organisation with many members of staff who aren't necessarily technically skilled, locking down your average staffer to a controlled, secured system is exactly what you want to do, and then maybe you also allow case-by-case exceptions for people who do know what they're doing.
If you allow more options, your help desk costs will be through the roof, not least because the ability for non-technical staff to become accustomed to established processes and then help each other goes way down.
In the specific case of browsers, you also have to consider the cost of maintaining your intranet applications and retesting every new version of a browser before it deploys. This is never going to happen on a six-weekly schedule for each major browser, because that would impose an absurd level of overhead on everyone maintaining those applications. But right now, Mozilla think a period of roughly a year constitutes long-term support, which clearly places them on a different planet from the professionals who actually have responsibility for these things.
Also, the cost of recovering from a successful attack on your infrastructure is horrible. The fewer chances that unskilled users have to screw up and let something bad in, the more you reduce the risk. One of the highest risk groups in the enterprise is the kind of user who thinks they know what they're doing and then opens up vulnerabilities you wouldn't otherwise have. They'll be the first to complain that your draconian restrictions are stopping them from doing something that in reality saves them a few seconds per day, and the last to take responsibility for that $100,000 outage while every infected machine in the department is restored from known good images or the painful fines for regulatory compliance violations because you can't audit your outgoing traffic for data leakage any more. (Well, the last except for anyone in management, who for some reason tend to assume rules don't apply to them despite lacking the technical understanding to even make that kind of judgement rationally.)
Unfortunately, many of these "standards-compliant" features aren't really standardised in any meaningful way yet. Of those that are, the quality of implementation across browsers is variable.
Chrome is very good at ticking more boxes than other browsers or winning on cute test pages, but personally I'd rather they fix the numerous layout bugs they seem to have when everyday features interact, or sort out the quality of their text rendering, or improve the performance of SVGs. There's little value in implementing a new feature well ahead of other browsers unless your users are in an intranet environment and can dictate that everyone must access those systems only with Chrome. There's not much more value in implementing a new feature, but doing it so badly that it's not suitable for production use.
In practice, it's often the least common denominator that determines whether new features are useful for real projects. That usually means recent versions of IE, which obviously lag in introducing features, but on the other hand they generally do provide a reasonably complete and robust implementation once they claim to support something.
You obviously have to cater for your own users, but if they really are running into work-related sites that don't work on recent versions of IE with any regularity, your case is an outlier.
You're missing the (valid) underlying point. These administrative tools do work for busy corporate sysadmins, as long as they use IE as their standard in-house browser.
If Mozilla and Google want to play at moving things around every few weeks and not offering meaningful long-term stability, they are simply not as good as Microsoft for business users who need a stable platform to run their intranets and custom apps.
If Mozilla and Google want to circumvent normal security policies and provide potential vulnerabilities in corporate networks as a result, then again they are simply not as good as relying on IE.
Serious organisations have more requirements than supporting some half-baked beta version of a new CSS feature that no-one with real web sites will be using for a few years. IE caters to those requirements. In several cases, Firefox and Chrome do not. That means IE is the better browser for those people. It might not be a popular sentiment with web-design-blog-reading-geeks, but it's a self-evident reality to the guys who are actually running IT for these organisations, and denying it won't change that.
As a web developer, I can only heartily support any effort to push people away from Google. YMMV, but I don't think they are a net positive contributor to the industry for either developers or users any more. I think they are more running on momentum earned from doing some good/useful things a few years ago than they are doing new good/useful things today.
Can you provide an example of such a zombie contract, that has terms that survive the... uh... contract termination?
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you just need to learn about the law and you're not deliberately trolling.
It's perfectly normal that the end of someone's employment does not imply that every term in their contract magically loses effect (and this is true in every jurisdiction I know about).
For example, if the employee has done the work, they're normally still entitled to the pay that goes with it. The employer can't just fire them and then say there's no contract any more so they don't owe them anything.
Likewise, if the employee has been trusted with trade secrets so they can do their job, their obligation to respect that secrecy doesn't end the moment their employment does. If they go out and tell everyone sensitive things about their past employer, they're still on the hook for it.
There is nothing "zombie" about this. It is absolutely routine.
unicorn contract terms notwithstanding, he was fired because he was an asshole. This is not in dispute. But he didn't sabotage the network.
If he was challenged over his security practices, and his response was to set up the devices in the network so no-one else could access them without breaking them (by losing the running configuration), then I think he did sabotage the network.
I don't see where he broke any laws or even behaved unethically.
We've already established that you don't know much about the law. As far as the ethics go, I think if you're responsible for expensive and essential infrastructure and you deliberately lock it up (or refuse to unlock it) before you leave so that your successor can't smoothly take over, you're actively screwing your employer and failing in your basic duty as an employee, and I don't see why you shouldn't be held accountable for that.
He doesn't deserve to be arrested, convicted, his career and life ruined because he refused to give up something in his head for free to a shitty ex-employer.
And as far as I can see, that isn't the reason that he's now suffering those consequences.
Leaving aside the fact that there could have been material terms in his employment contract that survive termination, it seems he was terminated for insubordination after he refused to cooperate.
He owes them nothing at that point, including the password. What crime did he commit by not revealing the password?
You could read the court proceedings and find out. After all, we have courts to determine the answer to exactly that question without any need for partially informed conjecture on Slashdot.
As for not owing them anything, it would be very surprising if he had no clause in his contract to cover returning property and similar behaviour upon termination, so even if he committed no crime, he's probably on the hook for civil damages if he fails to do that.
If you want me to talk to you then that is work and I no longer work for you.
True enough, but it would be surprising if the standard employment contract he signed up to didn't include a clause that says he has to give everything that belongs to the employer back at the end of his employment. IME, that kind of clause usually specifically covers both physical property and knowledge/electronic data, too.
You should have implemented a better system when I was employed for you.
This whole thing appears to have started when someone else with responsibilities for security/oversight was brought in, and she was investigating how the systems had been set up.
To take this into the real world, what would have happened if he had been killed in a traffic accident?
If he had been doing his job properly, the person he had set up as a stand-by to raise the bus number would have taken over. The fact that he hadn't made any such arrangement is in itself damning evidence against him.
In a city of techies like SF (where I live), it is absolutely unforgivable to allow a system design allowing for single authority. The city was negligent for ever letting it get this far.
What would you have them do to avoid this problem in the future? Perhaps they could hire someone who is a technical expert with overall responsibility for the department, whose job is to make sure something like this can't happen. Oh, wait...
Requiring the password? Sorry, that's their identity (and ass) on the line.
It's their identity on their employer's systems. If the employer makes a management decision to "compromise" that identity then that is 100% their decision to make, not IT's.
Of course, it also becomes management's responsibility. It's fair for the employee to want written confirmation to record the decision if he disagrees with it. But given that confirmation, the employee doesn't get a vote and has no right to object.
Until he has a clearly recorded transfer of responsibility, he shouldn't relinquish his password.
I think "You're fired" is a pretty clear transfer of responsibility.
Additionally, if his password is related to his personal passwords, releasing the password may constitute a legitimate risk to his privacy and fifth amendment rights.
Seriously? Really? This guy is a high-level IT expert within his organisation, and we're supposed to have sympathy if he not only reuses a password (or something related closely enough to risk the secrecy of another one) but reuses them on completely different systems, when he knows in advance that some are personal and some are professional? Give me a break. Any risk to his own privacy here is entirely self-inflicted, and trying to hide behind legal safeguards created with important and legitimate goals in order to cover your own malice and incompetence is the worst kind of legal wrangling.
Don't risk it. Have plans for unavailability, termination, and death.
That's great, but if the guy who betrayed you is the guy who was responsible for making those plans, there isn't much you can do. At most, you could have hired multiple people to act as mutual checks and balances by auditing the system, but the reality is that even the most high-level IT infrastructure today is still quite simplistic in its security, and unfortunately it remains a pretty easy mark for a skilled inside job.
Of course, if a government department did hire extra people, good enough to maintain proper oversight and audit each other's work in this kind of context but who weren't otherwise needed, many people who didn't understand the reason would be crying foul over wasteful government spending. And they'd have a point, given how rare incidents like this are and how much such people cost.
Cute, but missing the point that Tesco actually do make their money from their customers, and the UK supermarket industry is highly competitive. They could easily lose far more if even a small fraction of their customer base is upset enough to shop elsewhere next time than everything they'll make from creepyads. We all shop for groceries and many people have multiple supermarket chains within easy reach these days as well as various on-line options, so it's not exactly a great burden for those people to avoid Tesco if they feel like it.
So....everyone just needs to start getting out of the car to pump their gas at these stations with a mask on!!
You laugh, but I wonder how they'd react if you pulled up on a motorcycle and didn't remove your crash helmet before starting to fill up (something almost all petrol stations in the UK ask you to do for security reasons).
If a few bikers challenge the request on privacy grounds, and then ride off and fill up somewhere else if the attendants can't switch off the ad-cams, Tesco are going to wind up looking pretty silly.
I'd make some smart-ass comment about voting with my wallet, but then I've generally avoided my nearest Tesco store anyway since they installed ANPR camera enforcement on their car park and posters covered in legalese threatening to fine me lots of money for going shopping at their store. (Yes, there have been reports of people fined for allegedly breaking the rules when -- surprise -- it turned out to be the spy cam system not working properly.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a contract. This is the law. Violating it isn't a contract dispute. It is a criminal offense.
But presumably many/most of the people who were involuntarily detained and intrusively searched weren't committing a criminal offence, so what is the justification for the detention and search?
We shouldn't allow carte blanche intrusions into people's lives in exchange for just doing something that is a normal or even necessary part of those lives such as travelling from place to place or communicating with someone else. It's like saying we should condone arbitrary, abusive security theatre at an airport because terrrsm, and everyone "accepted" that they could be mistreated in those ways by buying a ticket so they have no grounds for complaint.
There would still be patents, copyrights and other IP claims from the big US guys to survive competition.
Not necessarily.
The US grants patents for several relevant fields that wouldn't be recognised or enforceable in many other places. Those patents have little if any value against competition based in one of those other places other than possibly preventing them from selling in the US (which in turn only harms other types of business there who can't benefit from the same competition-driven advantages that everyone else can).
Copyright only protects a specific expression of an idea. It doesn't stop anyone else reimplementing the same idea another way, and it certainly doesn't stop someone implementing a better idea for solving the same underlying problem. This is true even in the US.
And finally, even where IP rights would be practically enforceable abroad, that tends to be so because the US pushes hard in international negotiations to strengthen the protections that favour its home-grown economy. Other governments aren't going to remain as co-operative in those negotiations if their home-grown businesses are starting to compete and so their own economies stand to lose out.
Being seen as pro-US is becoming politically toxic to politicians in a lot of places already, so visibly sticking it to the United States' big business and/or government in these sorts of negotiations has basically no political downside and would more likely boost popularity with the local electorate. I suppose this is just another kind of long term fall-out from the generally offensive/dismissive attitude the US government has shown towards foreigners in recent months, and as with the more direct security concerns, it's not going to do their business world any favours.
That's why there is more than one pilot on a large commercial flight.
Right, but disturbingly often they both fall asleep at the same time:
According to the British Airline Pilots' Association (BALPA), 56 percent of 500 commercial pilots admitted to being asleep while on the flight deck and, of those, nearly one in three said they had woken up to find their co-pilot also asleep.
That's right out of the link I posted above, aside from the emphasis I added.
I'm not sure what you're describing is really anything new, though. High-end network monitoring and performance management tools have been commonplace in enterprise server rooms and data centres for some time. People get all hot and bothered about recent publicity for the NSA and such, but network taps themselves are simple, ubiquitous, and have many useful purposes aside from anything some might regard as shady. It's like the way span ports have been used, but more systematic and with greater capacity and flexibility.
Cisco themselves aren't a particularly big player in these kinds of markets, though. They often provide the heavy network switching and routing infrastructure, but usually it's other vendors who provide management and monitoring tools for various purposes. There's also a small but growing industry that exists just to bridge the gap from the live network to the tools, because you want to run a lot of those tools out-of-band and connect them into your network on demand.
Where does that leave us really?
Not relying on any one brand, presumably.
I wouldn't be surprised if all other U.S. companies suffer similar harm, and that's no cause for a party.
For a lot of people and a lot of different reasons, it would be cause for celebration if these markets opened up and weren't dominated by a few giants any more. That's the heart of the problem for the giants.
The related problem for the US government is that new entrants in the markets won't necessary be based in, or even operate in, the United States. Aside from any potential security concerns that might give them, it's going to hit the US tax man right in the spreadsheet.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple all go bankrupt at once because of this.
That is extremely unlikely. What is more plausible, however, is:
1. They continue to lose the confidence of international customers.
2. Those customers seek alternative arrangements that they consider more trustworthy, possibly ad-hoc ones at first.
3. Over time, a new generation of more structured alternatives begins to develop to supply the new market demand, offering similar services and products to the big name US brands.
Some of these may be direct commercial competitors, but that's not really the concern for the current market leaders, because the barrier to entry for anyone trying to compete head-on is huge. Probably the greater risk is collaborative movements, whether Open Source tools or simply a degree of standardisation and compatibility between smaller vendors that means you can build (for example) a heterogenous network using a pool of specialist vendors and have a good chance of it working.
This is potentially toxic to broad US vendors such as Cisco in the networking space or the big cloud services companies who ideally want you to outsource almost your entire IT infrastructure to them alone. Which brings us on to...
4. Even in the US, long-time and lucrative customers start second-guessing whether they still need US IT Brand X, and those brands start losing serious money to both the foreign movements and, over time, also to new competitors in the US who are riding the open/collaboration wave to get a disruptive foothold in the market.
And at that point, the big US vendors are really in trouble.
Emerging markets ... likely need enterprise class equipment too.
Well, yes and no, but reportedly 98.9% no in the case of at least one huge deal that fell through.
SDN is coming, and the likes of Cisco are terrified of it. So would you be if your own executives thought it was going to cut your company's value in half and there was little you could do about it.
The main thing they've got left to compete with is the trust in their brand, the idea that they're a safe bet and no-one ever got fired for buying Cisco. They're in trouble even without all the NSA publicity, but if their own government is damaging their established brand, it doesn't exactly help their situation.
Except for the manned visits we already made to the moon, you mean?
Or maybe you meant the unmanned probes that have visited many other planets and even left our solar system entirely.
Actually, pilots falling asleep at the controls, in some cases both at once, is one of the more genuinely terrifying aspects of modern aviation. It reportedly happens often, and the pilots' unions are vocal about the lack of adequate rest between cockpit hours. The only reason we don't hear more about it is because modern planes are (at the risk of grossly oversimplifying) basically flying themselves for much of their journey, so it's not as if they suddenly fall from the sky if someone dozes off for a couple of minutes mid-journey when there's nothing anywhere nearby.
But you do need to actually get there. Hence looking at Google maps on the phone.
Truly, it is a miracle that any of us who don't do that manage to arrive anywhere at all.
It's not like you can plan your route before you leave or anything.
I've even heard rumours that some modern SatNavs can be programmed with a destination before you start your journey!
If I can prove by experiment that can drive more safely while texting than most people with their attention fully focused on the road
I wish more people would actually try that. The reality check would probably shock some of them out of this kind of reckless behaviour, making us all safer.
How about a deal? You take that test, and if you really are safer while texting than most people when they're fully concentrating, you get to keep doing it, completely legally. However, if it turns out that you're actually more dangerous, and we also then know that you're deluded about your own abilities and therefore unable to properly judge how to drive safely within those abilities, you have to give up your licence and never drive again. Fair?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that if you've ever been responsible for sysadmin at all, it was only for a relatively small organisation. If you're responsible for a large organisation with many members of staff who aren't necessarily technically skilled, locking down your average staffer to a controlled, secured system is exactly what you want to do, and then maybe you also allow case-by-case exceptions for people who do know what they're doing.
If you allow more options, your help desk costs will be through the roof, not least because the ability for non-technical staff to become accustomed to established processes and then help each other goes way down.
In the specific case of browsers, you also have to consider the cost of maintaining your intranet applications and retesting every new version of a browser before it deploys. This is never going to happen on a six-weekly schedule for each major browser, because that would impose an absurd level of overhead on everyone maintaining those applications. But right now, Mozilla think a period of roughly a year constitutes long-term support, which clearly places them on a different planet from the professionals who actually have responsibility for these things.
Also, the cost of recovering from a successful attack on your infrastructure is horrible. The fewer chances that unskilled users have to screw up and let something bad in, the more you reduce the risk. One of the highest risk groups in the enterprise is the kind of user who thinks they know what they're doing and then opens up vulnerabilities you wouldn't otherwise have. They'll be the first to complain that your draconian restrictions are stopping them from doing something that in reality saves them a few seconds per day, and the last to take responsibility for that $100,000 outage while every infected machine in the department is restored from known good images or the painful fines for regulatory compliance violations because you can't audit your outgoing traffic for data leakage any more. (Well, the last except for anyone in management, who for some reason tend to assume rules don't apply to them despite lacking the technical understanding to even make that kind of judgement rationally.)
Unfortunately, many of these "standards-compliant" features aren't really standardised in any meaningful way yet. Of those that are, the quality of implementation across browsers is variable.
Chrome is very good at ticking more boxes than other browsers or winning on cute test pages, but personally I'd rather they fix the numerous layout bugs they seem to have when everyday features interact, or sort out the quality of their text rendering, or improve the performance of SVGs. There's little value in implementing a new feature well ahead of other browsers unless your users are in an intranet environment and can dictate that everyone must access those systems only with Chrome. There's not much more value in implementing a new feature, but doing it so badly that it's not suitable for production use.
In practice, it's often the least common denominator that determines whether new features are useful for real projects. That usually means recent versions of IE, which obviously lag in introducing features, but on the other hand they generally do provide a reasonably complete and robust implementation once they claim to support something.
You obviously have to cater for your own users, but if they really are running into work-related sites that don't work on recent versions of IE with any regularity, your case is an outlier.
If it does not do what you need then, yes.
You're missing the (valid) underlying point. These administrative tools do work for busy corporate sysadmins, as long as they use IE as their standard in-house browser.
If Mozilla and Google want to play at moving things around every few weeks and not offering meaningful long-term stability, they are simply not as good as Microsoft for business users who need a stable platform to run their intranets and custom apps.
If Mozilla and Google want to circumvent normal security policies and provide potential vulnerabilities in corporate networks as a result, then again they are simply not as good as relying on IE.
Serious organisations have more requirements than supporting some half-baked beta version of a new CSS feature that no-one with real web sites will be using for a few years. IE caters to those requirements. In several cases, Firefox and Chrome do not. That means IE is the better browser for those people. It might not be a popular sentiment with web-design-blog-reading-geeks, but it's a self-evident reality to the guys who are actually running IT for these organisations, and denying it won't change that.
As a web developer, I can only heartily support any effort to push people away from Google. YMMV, but I don't think they are a net positive contributor to the industry for either developers or users any more. I think they are more running on momentum earned from doing some good/useful things a few years ago than they are doing new good/useful things today.
They're only the latest version if you're on a recent version of Windows. Many people aren't.
Can you provide an example of such a zombie contract, that has terms that survive the... uh... contract termination?
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you just need to learn about the law and you're not deliberately trolling.
It's perfectly normal that the end of someone's employment does not imply that every term in their contract magically loses effect (and this is true in every jurisdiction I know about).
For example, if the employee has done the work, they're normally still entitled to the pay that goes with it. The employer can't just fire them and then say there's no contract any more so they don't owe them anything.
Likewise, if the employee has been trusted with trade secrets so they can do their job, their obligation to respect that secrecy doesn't end the moment their employment does. If they go out and tell everyone sensitive things about their past employer, they're still on the hook for it.
There is nothing "zombie" about this. It is absolutely routine.
unicorn contract terms notwithstanding, he was fired because he was an asshole. This is not in dispute. But he didn't sabotage the network.
If he was challenged over his security practices, and his response was to set up the devices in the network so no-one else could access them without breaking them (by losing the running configuration), then I think he did sabotage the network.
I don't see where he broke any laws or even behaved unethically.
We've already established that you don't know much about the law. As far as the ethics go, I think if you're responsible for expensive and essential infrastructure and you deliberately lock it up (or refuse to unlock it) before you leave so that your successor can't smoothly take over, you're actively screwing your employer and failing in your basic duty as an employee, and I don't see why you shouldn't be held accountable for that.
He doesn't deserve to be arrested, convicted, his career and life ruined because he refused to give up something in his head for free to a shitty ex-employer.
And as far as I can see, that isn't the reason that he's now suffering those consequences.
Leaving aside the fact that there could have been material terms in his employment contract that survive termination, it seems he was terminated for insubordination after he refused to cooperate.
He owes them nothing at that point, including the password. What crime did he commit by not revealing the password?
You could read the court proceedings and find out. After all, we have courts to determine the answer to exactly that question without any need for partially informed conjecture on Slashdot.
As for not owing them anything, it would be very surprising if he had no clause in his contract to cover returning property and similar behaviour upon termination, so even if he committed no crime, he's probably on the hook for civil damages if he fails to do that.
If you want me to talk to you then that is work and I no longer work for you.
True enough, but it would be surprising if the standard employment contract he signed up to didn't include a clause that says he has to give everything that belongs to the employer back at the end of his employment. IME, that kind of clause usually specifically covers both physical property and knowledge/electronic data, too.
You should have implemented a better system when I was employed for you.
This whole thing appears to have started when someone else with responsibilities for security/oversight was brought in, and she was investigating how the systems had been set up.
To take this into the real world, what would have happened if he had been killed in a traffic accident?
If he had been doing his job properly, the person he had set up as a stand-by to raise the bus number would have taken over. The fact that he hadn't made any such arrangement is in itself damning evidence against him.
In a city of techies like SF (where I live), it is absolutely unforgivable to allow a system design allowing for single authority. The city was negligent for ever letting it get this far.
What would you have them do to avoid this problem in the future? Perhaps they could hire someone who is a technical expert with overall responsibility for the department, whose job is to make sure something like this can't happen. Oh, wait...
Requiring the password? Sorry, that's their identity (and ass) on the line.
It's their identity on their employer's systems. If the employer makes a management decision to "compromise" that identity then that is 100% their decision to make, not IT's.
Of course, it also becomes management's responsibility. It's fair for the employee to want written confirmation to record the decision if he disagrees with it. But given that confirmation, the employee doesn't get a vote and has no right to object.
Until he has a clearly recorded transfer of responsibility, he shouldn't relinquish his password.
I think "You're fired" is a pretty clear transfer of responsibility.
Additionally, if his password is related to his personal passwords, releasing the password may constitute a legitimate risk to his privacy and fifth amendment rights.
Seriously? Really? This guy is a high-level IT expert within his organisation, and we're supposed to have sympathy if he not only reuses a password (or something related closely enough to risk the secrecy of another one) but reuses them on completely different systems, when he knows in advance that some are personal and some are professional? Give me a break. Any risk to his own privacy here is entirely self-inflicted, and trying to hide behind legal safeguards created with important and legitimate goals in order to cover your own malice and incompetence is the worst kind of legal wrangling.
Don't risk it. Have plans for unavailability, termination, and death.
That's great, but if the guy who betrayed you is the guy who was responsible for making those plans, there isn't much you can do. At most, you could have hired multiple people to act as mutual checks and balances by auditing the system, but the reality is that even the most high-level IT infrastructure today is still quite simplistic in its security, and unfortunately it remains a pretty easy mark for a skilled inside job.
Of course, if a government department did hire extra people, good enough to maintain proper oversight and audit each other's work in this kind of context but who weren't otherwise needed, many people who didn't understand the reason would be crying foul over wasteful government spending. And they'd have a point, given how rare incidents like this are and how much such people cost.
Cute, but missing the point that Tesco actually do make their money from their customers, and the UK supermarket industry is highly competitive. They could easily lose far more if even a small fraction of their customer base is upset enough to shop elsewhere next time than everything they'll make from creepyads. We all shop for groceries and many people have multiple supermarket chains within easy reach these days as well as various on-line options, so it's not exactly a great burden for those people to avoid Tesco if they feel like it.
So....everyone just needs to start getting out of the car to pump their gas at these stations with a mask on!!
You laugh, but I wonder how they'd react if you pulled up on a motorcycle and didn't remove your crash helmet before starting to fill up (something almost all petrol stations in the UK ask you to do for security reasons).
If a few bikers challenge the request on privacy grounds, and then ride off and fill up somewhere else if the attendants can't switch off the ad-cams, Tesco are going to wind up looking pretty silly.
I'd make some smart-ass comment about voting with my wallet, but then I've generally avoided my nearest Tesco store anyway since they installed ANPR camera enforcement on their car park and posters covered in legalese threatening to fine me lots of money for going shopping at their store. (Yes, there have been reports of people fined for allegedly breaking the rules when -- surprise -- it turned out to be the spy cam system not working properly.)