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Comment by treyfitty | Hacker News Reader

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I want to preface this by saying: "before passing judgement, context is always necessary."

Mario Savio was a Free Speach Activist and organized a protest to protect the Freedom of Speech at Berkeley around the 60s. In his speech to protestors, he says "there's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious... that you can't take part... and you've got to indicate to the people in charge that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from running at all!" Applied to free speech, this notion of disrupting the functioning of an organization was lauded, because freedom of speech is just that important.

But let's shift to employment. Without employment, it's very hard to survive. And here's a situation where the people in charge has the upper hand in every arena- hiring, pay, work Place behavior... etc. How do we know that the ex-admin wasn't blackmailed by the CEO to come back to work for free to fix something, or future references will be negative? Why are we so quick to side with the employer in this matter when we know nothing of the situation at all? Why do we start calling the employee a felon? He hasn't even been charged yet.

My point is, context is important. Fine, corporations have the power to ruin your life as a deterrent to keep you from acting against their interests, and that's just the way society is. And fine, We're not all rational at every instance of life. The calculus of establishing status quo equilibrium of those two conditions/constraints is hard, but without context to the situation, who are we to decide who's right or wrong? Would you label Mario Savio wrong for protesting and urging protestors to prevent the operation of the college from functioning in the name of preserving Free speech wrong? No, because you've learned the context.

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> without context to the situation, who are we to decide who's right or wrong?

You can comfortably make a determination about what is right and wrong. We don't know the facts, but if the claims are true, wiping out not just that company's property, but that of their customers, is a crime.

Now, sometimes a crime is justified, but I don't think it is a rush to judgement to work from a starting point that criminal behaviour is bad until proven otherwise.

I disagree. Once again, we can find a scapegoat at the lowest possible level and "stone" them or we can do a proper post mortem and try to learn from it.

Why did this happen? How can we prevent it from happening in the future? These are the questions we need to stress.

In particular, why does an ex-employee still have access to production? I say when something like this happens and heads must roll, they must roll at the top. Fire the CEO. Fire the board. Leave the sysadmin alone.

This is a civil matter. My tax dollars should not pay for a criminal lawsuit. Screw that.

Oh and by the way if you're reading this: please help repeal cfaa.

I think someone at the org needs to be responsible for not ensuring former employees' access is not revoked, but that doesn't mean an employee who takes advantage of that lapse isn't responsible for his/her actions.

Put another way, someone at Verelox screwed up and left the door unlocked, but that doesn't mean that the person who walked in broke stuff is in the clear.

Look, someone, without authorization, accessed a former employer's network and maliciously destroyed data. That's a crime. Sure, the CFAA is overly broad and is abused, but this is not one of those cases: this is a textbook example of something that should be prosecuted under the CFAA.

I disagree. The point of focus should be verelox and the criminal negligence on their part. Verelox is the criminal, not the victim. The clients may be the victims.

We should not equivocate on cfaa. It is good for nothing. Full and unconditional repeal should be our only demand.

> The point of focus should be verelox and the criminal negligence on their part. Verelox is the criminal

Nope. The affected customers probably have grounds for a civil suit, but no sane prosecutor would think bringing criminal proceedings against Verelox to make sense at all.

The ex-employee who perpetrated this is at fault as well and must bear responsibility for his destructive actions. Having the ability to do something (even due to a lapse in security) does not make that action moral or legal.

If some one hacked your bank account and stole 20k you'd be singing a different tune.

If someone hacked my bank account through no fault of my own, I'd be taking it up with my bank.

And in a lot of cases the bank would say Fuck you as with the increasing number of frauds committed in the UK where crims impersonate a house buyers solicitor and steal large sums of monney

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/12090890/Reveal...

If the bank does say fuck you, I'd file a complaint. If they still say fuck you, I'll reach out to the financial ombudsman service. And if they still say fuck you after that, I'll take them to small claims court.

What do you expect me to do? Investigate the matter myself? Buy myself an unlicensed firearm and look for the hacker to get it back at gunpoint?

In the multiple cases mentioned above the bank says not our problem and only reacted when it was on the front page of the daily telegraph

That's not exactly hacking, I've had a similar problem (paid rent by bank transfer and the "landlord" just vanished). The bank said "you transferred the money yourself, there's nothing we can do, it's like paying cash". Which is ridiculous, but technically it's not the bank's fault :/

> why does an ex-employee still have access to production?

Maybe he became an ex-employee after (and as a result of) wiping production.

Thanks for pointing it out. That is certainly a possibility given the ambiguity in the announcement. In fact, it's not even clear at this time whether wiping production was intentional or not.

I've heard stories where employees wiped production by accident and promptly became ex-employees, followed by their ex-employer trying to put all blame on them. We don't have enough information at this time to determine whether this is what happened at Verelox.

If you are a nefarious administrator, you don't think you could install something on your machines that would let you back in after they revoked your access?

> I disagree. Once again, we can find a scapegoat at the lowest possible level and "stone" them or we can do a proper post mortem and try to learn from it.

If he did it (intentionally wiping the servers), then he is a criminal and a bad person.

If he is a scapegoat, then he didn't do it, so that's a totally different situation.

I don't see how you can disagree with either of these statements.

And discussion of how he still had access is an unrelated matter.

> I say when something like this happens and heads must roll, they must roll at the top. Fire the CEO. Fire the board. Leave the sysadmin alone.

IIRC, the Soviet Union had a policy rather like this, referred to as something like the Vertical Stroke, where anytime there was a screw-up at a low level, they would fire the screw-up-ee's manager, and manager's manager, and so on, up to a very high level. The practical result was a drastic decrease in innovation and risk-taking. CEOs and others at that level usually aren't close enough to the guys actually doing direct work to supervise them all closely enough to ensure they don't make mistakes. All they can do is create a culture where there's a book of rules, and you don't deviate from the rules ever, for any reason, no matter what. So that's what they do, and that's the resulting culture and economy that you get.

Maybe we shouldn't rush to judge either sysadmins or CEOs, but instead figure out who, if anyone, actually did something malicious, and let everyone else take the lessons they've already learned from what happened.

The Soviets wouldn't actually fire them. They just lost their jobs due to missed time in Siberia or from having bullets in their brains.

Ah, well, that's ok then!

If corporations want us to treat them like people, I'm all for treating them like people. This means they are able to defend themselves in a criminal lawsuit and the board is willing to go to prison or the chair for the scrims of the organization.

They can't have it both ways.

>This is a civil matter. My tax dollars should not pay for a criminal lawsuit. Screw that.

So if an aggrieved ex employee does enough damage that the company has insufficient resources to sue, or has enough resources themselves to make that difficult, it's all good?

Individuals and companies should not be vulnerable to attacks like this based on their resources. It's in all our interests to ensure this sort if activity is dealt with severely because we are all vulnerable. Mutual defence in the form of criminal prosecution of offenders is the way they go IMHO.

Absolutely. Let's deal with it severely. Let's put the CEO and the board behind bars. I don't see how verelox is a victim. It is like saying a police officer who leaves his keys in the patrol car is a victim when someone takes of with the patrol car. The patrol car isn't his! Similarly, the data isn't verelox's!

Let's be practical. What is our end goal? Is it vengeance or is it prevention? If it is the latter, our actions must not be centered on retribution but rather on logic and reasoning. We should ask what can we do to prevent this from happening again? Throwing someone in prison is not the answer IMO.

We have no reason to suppose that the ex employees actions were justified. None whatsoever. He committed both a civil wrong and a crime and the default assumption ought to be that he ought to face both civil and criminal penalties. You tax dollars pay for punishing people who vandalize a car, I have no idea why they ought not to pay for punishing someone who vandalizes a server.

We may remain open to additional information without presuming that uncivil and illegal vandalism was justified indeed without inventing a narrative from whole cloth as you have done. The logical conclusion is that drawing from your own life experience you identify so strongly with the narrative of the wronged sysadmin that you desire to fit a narrative to sparse facts that has no basis in fact.

We are merely commenting on a story on hacker news. We aren't members of the jury and don't face the same burden or power. I'm down with repealing the cfaa because its badly written, I'm down with figuring out who dropped the ball as far as giving the sysadmin access post firing, but as to the sysadmin himself, burn the witch!

I take it you're one of those folks who doesn't care for the whole "innocent until proven guilty" concept.

We don't even have a name yet so we are talking about whomever did it. The unnamed guilty party is guilty by definition.

yes, the whole thing is a fiction

You'd be wrong. You may have noticed I qualified my statements with "if the claims are true".

That the actions described in the claims are criminal is not in doubt. Whether those actions actually took place is unproven, as is whether this unnamed ex-administrator performed those actions.

So, I'm not ready to say that this person is a criminal, or that a crime was committed, but I am ready to say that the actions described in the claim are criminal and wrong.

The point of "innocent until proven guilty" is that, in these situations, we don't argue from an assumption that the claims are truthfull.

Actually, we talk about what is and isn't a crime all the time. That's how the laws are made in the first place. ;-) We also say that people are alleged to have committed a crime. When you charge someone with a crime, you don't necessarily have definitive proof that they committed a crime. That's potentially established in a court of law.

Finally, all of that is applicable to the courts & government determining criminal acts. The courts don't determine what is moral or ethical. Lots of things are wrong that aren't criminal. Saying something particular behaviour wrong really doesn't have anything to do "innocent until proven guilty".

Saying that, "if someone did what the story said they did, it's wrong" is really not saying anyone is guilty of anything.

Trying to think of how to summarize this better. We can have right and wrong without having any guilty parties. Saying that murder isn't a crime isn't the same as saying that anyone was murdered or that a particular person committed the crime.

Who defines criminal behaviour? And why is criminal behaviour always placed on the little guy when companies can always get the leeway of claiming ignorance?

> Who defines criminal behavior?

We do.

The hell you do.

actually.. no. we do. We do it by proxy via our elected officials but our elected officials are supposed to follow the wishes of their constituents. They're the ones who create the laws that define criminal behavior. The courts use and refine those laws... but ultimately, yes the definition of criminal behavior is the result of the will of the populace.

Verelox is certainly not a major player in this space - aren't they little guys?

How many little shops rely on Verelox - aren't they little guys?

How many end customers depend on services that depend on Verelox - you know someone like you - aren't they the little guys?

"Who defines criminal behaviour?"

The police/prosecuting agency in the country where the company is based I imagine. That appears to be Holland [1]

[1] https://www.ripe.net/membership/indices/data/us.verelox.html

The fact that it was an ex-administrator does suggest foul play as opposed to a mistake compounded with poor backup processes. We shall have to see how the story pans out.

Netherlands and no, the police doesn't define what is criminal - the PARLIAMENT, ie the law-creating body, does.

I should have been clearer: The police/prosecuting authorities will decide if the behaviour in this case was criminal and if there is enough evidence to bring charges under the law - the law(s) in question having been passed by Dutch Parliament. Thanks

> Who defines criminal behaviour?

Sigh. I can't believe we're going there on this one. Just so we're clear, you think that maybe the definition of criminal behaviour shouldn't include wiping out systems without the owner's consent?

> And why is criminal behaviour always placed on the little guy when companies can always get the leeway of claiming ignorance?

I don't know what you are talking about. Criminal behaviour is placed on the criminal... and ignorance of the law is not a defense.

Employment is a voluntary transaction, entered into by both parties. One should always focus upon increasing their own skill set such that an employer may be able to make your life temporarily difficult, but your skills and value to an employer (or future employer) are such that they can't "ruin your life".

Employment isn't voluntartly: there is strong economic coercion to be employed and high degrees of friction are introduced to make that coercion more effective.

Urbanization fundamentally has been engineered to create "wage slaves", who are basically modern sharecroppers (though the system has some extra steps).

Being employed isn't voluntary because there are finite resources available to humanity and no one wants to waste those resources supporting a lazy person who doesn't contribute anything.

Being employed at a particular organization is, in fact, voluntary. You are not obligated to stay at one employer forever.

What a nice false dichotomy, we are free as in free to chose our salve master, and there are only 2 possible states of humanity, to be a slave or to be lazy / a useless eater .. lets not talk about the slave masters and the hollywood-production american dream(tm) illusion that _every slave_ can make it to the top (which, for everyone who actually checks is just what it is, propaganda) .. I want to applaud the institution that managed to wipe..ehm teach you such a illuminating world view, very, very .. convenient

Calling a situation in which an employer trades you money for your time and effort "slave labor" is a disgusting metaphor and an affront to actual slaves. You should be ashamed.

I enter into employment agreements knowing full well that it's a business transaction. The business and I have agreed to an amount of money (and other benefits) in exchange for my labor.

It's not about the American dream. It's not about "slave labor". It's about you give me money for services I provide. When either of us decides that deal isn't advantageous for us anymore, then we end that agreement.

Stop being edgy.

> Calling a situation in which an employer trades you money for your time and effort "slave labor" is a disgusting metaphor and an affront to actual slaves

Incorrect. Throughout history there has been many societies where people would legally sell themselves into slavery (e.g. to pay a debt, under threat of being imprisoned) and even receive a meager salary.

Yet it's still slavery; you can look up the definition in a dictionary.

Do you make median income or less? (For a full-time worker, that's about 41,000/yr.)

I think most of HN is in the "baronet" class (say, 2-3x of median income) or higher, and doesn't necessarily have a good perspective on what most people (ie, those at or below median income) deal with.

Per capita income has flatlined for a decade (since 2008), after 60 years of steady growth. But that largely doesn't impact programmers, entrepreneurs, etc. Instead, it impacts the people on the bottom.

Just because the present system works for you doesn't mean it works for everyone.

It was always good to be king.

Vast majority of people are in jobs they didn't want getting paid very little. Many are working several jobs. This is all by design of corrupt politicians and self-serving elites in business who have forced higher productivity, cut jobs, and shifted almost all rewards to least-productive people on top. Usually barely-skilled, biased managers are deciding who gets hired, how they're treated, and why they're fired. This is often related to politics more than job performance.

So, overall, it looks more like a form of economic slavery than some cooperative, voluntary, win-win system. A good hint is that most of the wealth has moved into few hands who usually didn't work their way up into it from the bottom like the people producing it. The people producing it didn't want that arrangement either. They have no control, though, since the elites outspend all of them combined on politicians passing these laws, media shaping perspectives, and public education limiting their intellectual growth while simultaneously reinforcing submission to authority (esp arbitrary requirements) daily for 12+ years. Most of America is born into a new form of slavery that few ever escape.

This is insightful. One test we can apply is to ask ourselves, "If I needed to stop working and quit my job permanently because <put compelling reason here, e.g. illness, old age>, could I do so without enduring a financial disaster leading to <something horrible, e.g. homelessness, relying on the kindness of strangers, suicide>?"

I suspect that, for many, if not most of us, the loss of the ability to earn income would be an unspeakably grave event. This puts to the lie that we have any real choice about employment, assuming we are one of the vast majority of people who is not financially independent.

> [..] since the elites outspend all of them combined on politicians [..]

"[the illusion of]"Democracy", "Organized religions", "history of our society", esp. the last 300 years or so", 3 of the most profitable lies in todays day and age. Its wrong to say that this "happens to be happening because A, B .. Z", this is "works-as-designed". A world viewed from the top has no nations, only powerful blood-lines, it has not morals only self interest, it has no humanity only contempt of the "human animals" they have inherited and extended control over. It's them, a new species, and us, the soon-to-be transformed, stripped of everything that could challenge them, rest of the world.

If you wouldn't [work for a "slave-master"] you'd end up homeless on the street, no option to enter university, change your qualification, travel and get some experience abroad, start a business, nothing, absolutely 0 social mobility. Todays slavery does not need chains, it only needs ideology "on the west"(of which direct application you are a great example of), and an unprecedented murderous machine abroad(which you have no idea about, not the slightest)

> Being employed isn't voluntary because there are finite resources available to humanity and no one wants to waste those resources supporting a lazy person who doesn't contribute anything.

Don't say "no one".

Productivity keeps rising. It becomes possible to support non-workers with a smaller and smaller fraction of that. And thorough safety nets help non-lazy people too. They even help people create their own businesses!

This is much like my response to the old employer gambit, "you say you find your job very fulfilling so why do you want a pay raise?"

I do my job because I love it. I do my job for you because you pay me more than the next guy.

> Urbanization fundamentally has been engineered to create "wage slaves"

Suppose someone was born out in the forest, and there were no cities, no societies, no technology. Would you call that person a sustenance slave? Would you say that their foraging was involuntary?

the distinction is that there is a willful effort to exploit and to enslave on the part of someone (be it a person, corporation or market

> the distinction is that there is a willful effort to exploit and to enslave on the part of someone (be it a person, corporation or market

That's right, and it's a shame it's been downvoted.

Very insightful question. This gives me an alternative context in which to frame the "wage slave" concept. Thank you.

Also for context: Just because an alternative is worse or "just as bad" doesn't mean that the status quo is okay. The United States is fucked up in many ways, regardless of the fact that Somalia has had it much worse.

>> Urbanization fundamentally has been engineered to create "wage slaves"

> Suppose someone was born out in the forest, and there were no cities, no societies, no technology. Would you call that person a sustenance slave? Would you say that their foraging was involuntary?

No, they are not a slave because they have no master except nature.

A wage slave has at least one master: his boss and the system that forces him to work for one.

Foraging (or farming, hunting, etc) is involuntary. Nature has compulsive power via biological needs and imperatives.

The difference lies in the fundamental difference between natural law and synthetic human systems. Entropy isn't your master, it's a fact of your own existence.

By contrast, the present economic system is a synthetic construct made by other humans to exploit you, designed with largely that purpose, co-opting your biological needs for coercive power, and doesn't necessarily need to happen.

That's what makes one slavery and the other not.

The difference is so obvious, I actually am confused why you think conflating physics with political norms was appropriate.

If the employment market is equivalent to slavery, it not obviously so. Saying it was designed for our exploitation implies a level of conspiracy and central control that I find dubious.

depends if their mom and pop sent them to work the fields. There's many such communities throughout the world. Some even keep real slaves. (particularily in Saudi Arabia)

Most of society (and the wage slave concept) is about human farming.

would you say you are a farmer or livestock?

They don't have a boss, they can't be fired, they don't generate wealth that someone else keeps. On the other side there are huge material benefits to coordinating with many people, even if that coordination is done via a system that exploits you. Not a good comparison.

Real slaves would find your pedantic definition of "wage slaves" offensive.

No one has the perfect job, everyone thinks they should make more, have more benefits, more freedom. But everyone has choices. You don't have to participate in the rat race, you can stop letting material possessions drive your lifestyle decisions.

Everyone has choices, it's true.

The choices that are available, however, have an extreme variance from person to person. At the extremely shitty end, Viktor Frankl, while a captive of a Nazi death camp, worked out that when all other choices are taken from a person, the only remaining one is to die with dignity.

But it's a choice, right?

At the other end of the spectrum, choices may include where to vacation this winter or if the maid should be fired.

The bottom line is that the quality and quantity of choices vary so much, depending on luck and pluck, that it's a bit glib to say "everyone has choices", including, I guess, the choice between working a crappy, abusive, mean job or two to make ends meet, or starve.

Depends on the slave, but I call bullshit on "don't have to participate". If I don't participate, in 3-4 months I'd be homeless and with nothing to eat. What gives?

I didn't say you didn't have to work.

I said you didn't have to participate in the rat race.

For most of human history, choosing not to work for 3 months meant starvation and death. Hunter-gatherers had to work.

My brother is 50 years old and has delivered pizzas for about the last 20 years. He only works enough to afford to rent a room, own a car, and pay for an annual ski pass, and skiing/volleyball gear. He spends his free time on the mountain and the lake.

He obviously doesn't own many material possessions and his retirement isn't going to be pretty. But that choice was his, he had opportunities to work corporate and make far more money, own more stuff, and maybe raise a family, but he chose to have more freedom and the lifestyle he preferred.

"It could be worse" fallacy.

I don't think everyone has the luxury to philosophize about giving up material possessions and exiting the rat race, either. A lot of people are living from paycheck to paycheck (or worse), have dependents, and don't have the prospects to find a new job. Those people can't afford to say "no" to their boss' unreasonable demands.

Employment is a relation of subordination, inherently unbalanced. People also happen to need money to live, making work not a voluntary transaction, unless you consider death a viable option. That is not considering other factors, such as having to feed other members of your family. It is made even more unbalanced by the amount of influence your employer can have in your life by firing you, as opposed to the influence you can have on him by quitting. Employment is coercion.

I wish HNers would get their heads out of their tech arses and face the reality. Most people do _not_ have a choice where they work. Most people cannot afford to quit. Most people don't have jobs where they can increase their skillsets. Most people do not have time to read HN while they enjoy their 10 AM pause in their comfy sofa while working from home. You are, for the most part, amongst the most privileged people in the world. Yet you continue to spew the "employment is voluntary" propanganda because you never had to face actual hardships. Worse, you push people of lower classes even further in the ground, when what you should be doing is elevating them to make a better and fairer society.

People don't need money to live - they need food and shelter that is typically provided by someone else's work. Find a way to pay them directly and you don't need to work for an asshole boss anymore. The problem is, a lot of people are in a situation where they don't have that much to offer.

> Why are we so quick to side with the employer in this matter when we know nothing of the situation at all?

It's called collateral damage. There is no context, outside of fantasy, where the admin could be in the right to do this.

Eh, I'm inclined to agree with you that the ex admin isn't "right" but the essence of my statement is that he may have been carrying out what was his optimal strategy.

If you treat people bad, they'll treat you bad. If you nuke Russia, Russia will nuke you. It's the Nash Equillibrium where each party is faced with a game and certain situations call for your best move. But your best move should account for what I'll do, and that should be factored into your initial move.

Mutually assured destruction is actually a powerful deterrent. Do we know what the ex-admin's situation was prior to all this? Only then should we pass judgement.

Morally, I'd say the ex-employee doesn't have a leg to stand on. If the employee had been wronged and their actions only negatively impacted the employer, then I'd be sympathetic, but all of Verelox's customers have been damaged, some of them perhaps irreparably, by this. Getting back at your employer with such huge amounts of collateral damage is never acceptable.

I find it hugely improbably that ex-admin's situation entailed being wronged by all of the customers whom he impacted by this action.

You are basically justifying the 'killing of innocents' here..

If we assume that the firm did awful things to the employee, we can't also consider those who employed the firm to do those awful things "innocent".

What if the customers' data was preserved, archived, and sent to them as links? And just the VPS was trashed? Now, we're talking a brief disruption instead of total loss which the customers indirectly signed up for by going with a cheap, small player instead of one qualified to provide higher availability and security.

The collateral damage would low to non-existent for the users depending on how critical the service was. The direct damage would be to the employer. If the employer was the bad guy (hypothetically), would you still state there's no context or any situation whatsoever where the employee should cause them damage?

Pedantry.

If their employer was a James Bond level super-villain about to shortly kill millions you could construct this scenario.

Otherwise there is no scenario where inflicting what you term a "brief disruption" (but what they'd likely describe as an awful, painful and expensive) to thousands of innocent customers is justified. Customer costs could easily be millions, if 1,000 customers each spend over ten hours of worker time dealing with that disruption.

If the employer did something illegal, report them to the authorities. If they wronged you, other employees, or customers, take them to court and publicize their malfeasance.

If you can't do any of those things because what the company did wasn't wrong or illegal, and instead wipe their servers, you are a sad little loser who can't handle the fact that they just didn't like you, and for good reason.

Man, your comment is so far off base and patronizing, that I think you're the sad loser here.

The ex-admin in question probably understood the impending customer harm. But the customers are the veins of a company- without them, they're not a company at all. The ex-admin just played dirty- something that he thought was the only way to win a lopsided battle against a force much greater than he.

In David V Goliath, Goliath was taken down... with a slingshot. A weapon. And he's celebrated as someone over coming a stacked challenge. The customers were the ex-admins slingshot. The difference is that the law doesn't allow this behavior

"Otherwise there is no scenario where inflicting what you term a "brief disruption" (but what they'd likely describe as an awful, painful and expensive) to thousands of innocent customers is justified. Customer costs could easily be millions, if 1,000 customers each spend over ten hours of worker time dealing with that disruption."

That same logic would make it unjustified for them to be using such a small, unproven service to begin with. I mean, the first thing I do for mission-critical stuff is to see if the hardware, software, or service has supported long periods of uptime with easy maintenance and security patches. Also, has anything really bad like preventable breaches happened? And how are the servers configured by default?

Further, if you're worried about downtime so much, you have two providers in a setup with replication plus failover. The only people responsible for service going down and data destroyed completely in a world where basic HA is cheap are the customers. They should assume some shit could happen. They should mitigate it if it matters. Those that didn't took the risk willingly. Backups in particular are also really cheap these days.

"If the employer did something illegal, report them to the authorities. "

People have reported all kinds of big companies to the authorities for breaking the law. Goldman Sachs nearly destroyed the financial system. They got criminal immunity + $1 trillion from the government whose Treasury was run by their ex-CEO who profited off that activity. They and most of the rest like them still in business mostly without anyone doing time on the top. What's your next move for punishment if law doesn't care or is receiving bribes (esp Congress)?

"If you can't do any of those things because what the company did wasn't wrong or illegal"

Wrong and illegal are two different things. Slavery was legal but wrong. Locking child workers in buildings that might catch fire to force overtime was horribly wrong but legal. Civil forfeiture... taking an innocent person's money or property w/out charges... is wrong but legal. All kinds of abuse of employees, esp regarding promotions or references, is harmful to all but people on top and legal.

You're clear that no illegal action should be taken in response to a wrong. I'm guessing you oppose the underground railroads that freed slaves since they were illegal. You would have griped about it at best while all the harm continued to those people if working within the legal framework.

I don't know man. I can't see any situation where these actions are justifiable. Revenge generally helps no one.

For what it's worth, revenge doesn't require a net benefit to the situation. The word "revenge" is kind of similar to "retaliation" where an actor is purely seeking retribution for a past event without regard.

To us, it's not justifiable. Hell, the ex-admin may think so too. But that doesn't mean we should automatically side with the employer and subsequently crucify the ex-admin. We don't have any information yet.

How do we even know the story is at all truthful? Maybe someone who still works there did something stupid they couldn't recover from and is now blaming it on "an ex-admin" to make it sound nice.

Is your first assumption always that the victim made up a story to cover up their own misbehavior?

Is your first assumption that people only post their first assumptions? WTF dude. There are plenty of people in this thread already ready to tar and feather a completely unknown person. I'm just trying to point out that we don't actually know anything about what is going on.

Free speech: telling your boss off, quitting, organizing a walk out, refusal to work, picketing, posting your story online to warn other potential employees and customers just who their doing business with

Not free speech: punching your boss in the face, burning the building down, vandalizing the office, deleting all the data on the servers and hurting a bunch of people that had nothing to do with your conflict with management

I'm all about workers right and have walked out on many a job because management were raging assholes. I have convictions and I stand by them but conviction and doing the right thing in life often come with sacrifices. I'm currently underemployed because of my convictions but I can sleep at night knowing I'm doing the right thing. The way for us to take back power in the tech industry is to organize, unionize and refuse to work for abusive and exploitative employers. We're the ones with the skills. They need us not vise versa.

Mental gymnastics.

speech

Wow. That just shows just how reliant I've become of autocorrect. It didn't autocorrect, nor did it present a red underline, and I had a feeling "Speach" looked wrong. But I doubted myself and figured autocorrect would have my back.

I agree with you. The majority of people in this thread have completely internalized that property rights are more valuable than human rights. Only one comment I've seen has acknowledged that all we have is a single webpage with a single accusation, and yet many people leap straight to the conclusion not only that the individual in question exists and is guilty, but that there can be no justification for a person destroying a business. Businesses destroy people all the time. I for one would like to see the tables turned more often.

HN is full of baronets arguing in favor of the modern social order -- because while they're not real aristocrats, they're not peasants.
Corporations function as de facto titles of nobility in the US, so crossing one is crossing social rank.

> HN is full of baronets arguing in favor of the modern social order -- because while they're not real aristocrats, they're not peasants.
I think that's very on point. While HN is a technology site, it's also one for "founders" * who aspire join the elite of that social order, which explains the exaggerated empathy for the interests of shareholders and companies.
* (and those with fantasies of being one)

you have to be "someone" to become "someone", even if you suddenly earned 30% of shares in facebook, it would not make you "part of the elite", there is only so high you can get without [the right] family background (see billy gates who's mother - the less interesting part of the picture - was co-chair at / IBM CEOs personal friend .. so much for the hollywood story of the "deal of the century" ft. young billy and DOS .. aaand FTCvIBM but the cast/story gets even more interesting later on

We have responded to the article based on the information presented.
There is nothing to imply human rights have been violated. If such information is presented im sure people will respond in kind.

> We have responded to the article based on the information presented.
> There is nothing to imply human rights have been violated. If such information is presented im sure people will respond in kind.
What are you talking about? There is no "article," only the statement of one involved party. It's right to be skeptical and theorize about what else might have gone on that was omitted from that statement out of self-interest.

>I for one would like to see the tables turned more often.
The most prominent example of this in recent memory is Peter Thiel sponsoring Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker. Do you approve of what he did?

" I for one would like to see the tables turned more often."
I don't know you.
But what I have learned that people who do not care about other peoples property, care very much about their own. Destroy other people business? Go for it! Destroy my car which I could kill someone with? No way, it's mine, I've worked hard for it. Vandalize houses of rich people? Go for it! Steal my iPhone? Hey, where is the police when you need them?
In Berlin people cheer the burning of other peoples BMWs - yes this is a thing. The same people go to court when the police scratches their table tennis table during a raid.

"Businesses destroy people all the time".
Lol. Citation please.
I'd like to see the justification for forcing thousands of customers into expensive disaster recovery because the company fired a sysadmin, likely for good reason.

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