Ex Microsoft staffer arrested for allegedly stealing Win 8 trade secrets
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
Does this mean journalists will now go to jail for exposing "trade secrets"? What if these "trade secrets" are against the common good?
I see such a law as a conflict to a free society. Not that we really live in one. At this point, we might as well throw the Constitution into the garbage :-(
And since corporations are considered people, why aren't corporations arrested and thrown in jail for stealing from the public?
Not all intellectual property is legally protected against theft this way though (otherwise any disclosure of IP could be theft). The bar for intellectual property to be legally considered a trade secret is high. If the IP isn't sufficiently secret, it's legally less clear whether you can really steal it. Just stamping it "secret" isn't enough. To be a trade secret the company needs to prove that it's a secret, that the secrecy of the IP is highly valuable (for instance loss of the IP's secrecy hurts a competitive advantage), and that they've made significant attempts to keep it secret by limiting access to "need-to-know" people and protecting the IP though appropriate security and secrecy.
In this case, it sounds like the defendant may have gained physical access to a building he didn't legally have access to (ie company made an attempt to limit access with some security) and copied data off a server. MS is arguing that this hurt them financially.
A defense against this might be to claim that even if the data might have been valuable and releasing it harmed the company, they didn't treat it with enough secrecy/security for it to be considered a trade secret. If that's what the court decides, then there could still be a civil suit (breaking employment NDA contract, etc), but it wouldn't be a criminal matter.
I've had a technical workaround in mind for this for a while now: if we could annotate the "intent" of a comment--if we could say "this post is intended as a humorous aside"--then the sub-thread hanging off any joke-thread could be automatically semi-collapsed, such that only the root joke-post and a bit of the first reply would show. (Or collapsed entirely if you set "hide post types: {humor, ...}" in prefs.)
I'm not sure what the social ramifications would be, but I think it's at least different than the "hide different posts from different people" idea that creates filter-bubble communities--you'd be showing/hiding comment sub-threads based on something more akin to the "cross-cutting concerns" of Aspect-Oriented Programming, than on their message per se.
We read lots about federal agencies involvement in corporate troubles.
Where is the threshold of involvement? What makes corporation eligible for such a care?
Likewise with your startup's trade secrets.
But Microsoft or Goldman Sachs will get the attention of the FBI right quick when they complain. You would get some attention if you showed up dead with a gunshot wound instead of just missing a teevee -- if you're white, anyway. But if you show up dead in a car crash, the cops won't care once they scrape you up so traffic can flow. Police have a complicated set of social criteria they use to decide what to care about. Mostly they correspond to social priorities.
Not for nothing, but a significantly less serious crime than a B&E got an undercover police officer stationed in an apartment behind my house. I'm sure you're right that the average TV theft isn't going to make a federal case, but part of the reason for that is that most people don't make that much of a fuss over having their TV stolen.
Microsoft isn't putting any trade secrets into Windows that are worth millions of dollars; they publish the object code to 500 million PCs, each one of which can decompile it all. A few hardware manufacturers may have contracts demanding M'soft protect their trade secrets -- the secret usually being all the patents they infringe -- by keeping driver BLOBs obscure, but I doubt that's at issue here.
I don't think there will be tens of millions in fines, either. Maybe thousands and a few months in jail.
Tens of millions (billions, really) may be all the salaries of employees that make M'soft a big name company that can call up the FBI and USA to get attention. But that's what I said before. It's a matter of social priorities.
Also, congrats that your local police cared and had the resources to look out for your neighbor. Most departments don't have that level of resources. We had to work for months to get ours to pay that much attention to a convenience store that had some armed robberies in a residential neighborhood.
Incidentally, I tried to make a fuss over a stolen teevee and nice camera once. Didn't help.
What you said is similar to the MPAA commercials. It even has your stolen television analogy in it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU I hope you only watched entertainment that you paid for. Otherwise you broke the law.
How much control does the state and corporations have over people?
The harsher the penalties are for trivial things, like copying data, the more of a stranglehold corporations & the state have over people. IMO, copying data is a copyright issue, not a criminal matter. Freedom should not be taken away. In recent history, there have been a flood of laws that take away freedom from the American people to enforce corporate "property". If you open your eyes, you can see the direction that this leads.
To take your jaywalking example further, if jaywalking involves life sentences, it gives the police the option to selectively enforce the rules. Most people have jaywalked in their lifetime. The police & criminal justice system can arrest & prosecute people they don't like & leave the people they do like alone.
The RIAA tried to make downloading movies a criminal matter. They lobbied hard. It was only the vigilance of the world's citizens that prevented mass arrests.
We see this happening with the war on drugs. The war on drugs is used to oppress African Americans and for the profit of the prison & police industrial complex. Companies that build & operate prisons make a lot of money from taxpayers because there are a lot of prisoners for things that should not be crimes. The war on drugs was never about the health & safety of Americans. That is just slick marketing.
Wow.
Umm maybe because Skydrive offers 100GB (200 bing points) compared to dropbox at 2gb and google drive at 15gb. You know you need space for all these heavy uploads.
Oh, and I think it's called One Drive or something now, due to a naming dispute and possibly xbone inspiration for the replacement.
...
I'm tired.
I don't get any hits on Google for this before today.
And another expansion on what the leak could allow:
"According to the reports, not only was Windows 8 leaked, but he also leaked Windows 7 files and the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit which when reverse engineered, could allow hackers to crack the Activation process within Windows, meaning that pirated copies of Windows 7 could continue to function without the nagging presence of popup messages warning users about their copy of Windows."[2]
[1]: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Ex-Microsoft-employee...
[2]: http://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/03/microsoft-employee-responsi...
They already have. Well, maybe not exactly cracked, but there are workarounds. I'm pretty sure I don't need to list them here, because they're just a google search away.
Either way, pretty sure all MS products are widely available pirated.
Guilty or not, it's almost as if the intent of this article is to defame.
This is a low PR point for Microsoft as far as I'm concerned. The only companies that pull this shit are already circling the drain.
(Disclosure: I am a developer at the company)
No.
Goldman Sachs is doing quite well, thanks. [0]
[0] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/aleynikov-sentencin...
HFT is just one strategy and one that is persistently a flusher at Goldman.
Edit: Goldman lost its culture and with it the only thing that made them great. They still have name recognition with people outside of finance but to most people with industry experience it's not the first-choice place to go work anymore (like for almost 10 years now). In fact, their reputation is growing increasingly negative with insiders. They will still be a darling for pensions and corporate bank customers for quite a while because longevity and name recognition are everything in that business.
(Full disclosure: used to work with HFT infrastructure for a NY hedge fund)
I'm not sure who would want to steal secrets on how to ruin an OS, but there you go...
"Trade Secrets" is a little extreme, except for maybe the windows activation source code. That certainly makes windows activation easier to crack.