What did you hope to accomplish with this post? "Here's someone who did something bad, who can't undo it, and who feels bad enough to come clean - let's rub it in so as to discourage others from doing so"?
Edit: What about the employer's choices to go ahead with it? No anger directed that way? This guy should have fallen on his sword but his company gets a pass?
Please don't mistake my lack of attention to Blizzard's complicity as a 'pass'.
I actively campaign against folks who would bury their heads in the sand. In the past decade I have spent huge effort (preaching?) to convince my peers not to accept work in these Military Industrial jobs and to leave them if they're already there. I've had quite a bit of success in that regard, and I would encourage (as I tried in my response) that others would help educate their peers as well.
And I wish more people would stand up and say it to their friends and relatives when those people graduate college and start talking about working for the Military Industrial Complex, "Cyber" anything, or various other companies who build bombs, agents of war, or devices used to subjugate other humans.
I hope this person will work hard to redeem what he's wrought. Nothing else can redeem him, his work won't just disappear for his remorse.
>Too bad your behavior is not undoable and you'll have to live with it for the rest of your life. Maybe you can do something to recover for it in the future. Hopefully your ethical failure can serve as an example of what not to do.
I hope that others will send the message loudly and clearly to those that would create bomb parts or fragments of code necessary for snooping tools or facilitate those who would like to usurp peaceful human behavior.
You now say that the aim was to get repentance, when he's already stated he regrets it. At no point do you give advice about what he could/should do now to 'make up for his sins', apart from 'feel really bad'.
What do you want him to do to make up for it? Travel to China and tell the government to stop spying on their people using software he helped program?
My problem is with the comment that does nothing more than lambast someone without providing anything constructive. Offering some comment on how to approach such a situation next time, or what he could now, or projects he might think about contributing to, or anything else that might be useful to the person who originally posted or others reading the thread. As it stands, it's not much better than an ad-hominem.
The Internet is not a confessional and speaking your sins out loud here doesn't automatically absolve you. But that might be an impression one could get if the only responses were in the tone of "thank you for telling us, you're a brave and good man". So we need comments, like mr_spothawk's, that basically say "you're not a bad guy, but you fucked up; here's why and how exactly; let's hope we can all learn from this".