Ex-IBM Employee Guilty of Stealing Secrets For China (fortune.com) 71
An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:
A former developer for IBM pled guilty on Friday to economic espionage and to stealing trade secrets related to a type of software known as a clustered file system, which IBM sells to customers around the world. Xu Jiaqiang stole the secrets during his stint at IBM from 2010 to 2014 "to benefit the National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China," according to the U.S. Justice Department. In a press release describing the criminal charges, the Justice Department also stated that Xu tried to sell secret IBM source code to undercover FBI agents posing as tech investors. (The agency does not explain if Xu's scheme to sell to tech investors was to benefit China or to line his own pockets).
Part of the sting involved Xu demonstrating the stolen software, which speeds computer performance by distributing works across multiple servers, on a sample network. The former employee acknowledged that others would know the software had been taken from IBM, but said he could create extra computer scripts to help mask its origins.
At one point 31-year-old Xu even showed undercover FBI agents the part of the source code that identified it as coming from IBM "as well as the date on which it had been copyrighted."
Part of the sting involved Xu demonstrating the stolen software, which speeds computer performance by distributing works across multiple servers, on a sample network. The former employee acknowledged that others would know the software had been taken from IBM, but said he could create extra computer scripts to help mask its origins.
At one point 31-year-old Xu even showed undercover FBI agents the part of the source code that identified it as coming from IBM "as well as the date on which it had been copyrighted."
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but why let IBM SELL It's own shirty CEPH written by H1B's and you get layed off with no pay?
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Well apart from the fact that GPFS or Spectrum Scale as they like to call it these days is a couple of orders of magnitude better than CEPH.
What puzzles me about this is that the licensing enforcement on GPFS is zero, nada none at all. You need a valid license to download the software but after that you just run mmlicense to say the node is licensed and bingo you are done. You could have purchased a couple of server license and be running 10 servers and 1000 nodes. It's not like the BSA can muscle their way
Re: At least they didn't execute him (Score:2)
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No, the west does not execute spies.
That's not true [wikipedia.org]; it just hasn't happened in a long time.
Who cares? (Score:4)
China got what it wanted and this guy will spend a few years clothed, housed and fed by the taxpayer before retiring as a people's hero with a medal in China.
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China got what it wanted and this guy will spend a few years clothed, housed and fed by the taxpayer before retiring as a people's hero with a medal in China.
Ideally it would be much longer than a few years. A sentence of 50 years or more would be ideal. That way we can warehouse this guy until the day when the Chinese have somebody that we want and then we can make a trade. This is why it's better not to execute spies when we catch them, you never know when they might come in handy to make a trade with a regime that otherwise might be disinclined to do a deal under any other circumstances. In fact, when they know that you gave their spy a bullet to the back of
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Re: The Chinese (Score:1, Offtopic)
Ya ya ya been hearing that since I was a child
Been to China and India on multiple occasions, nice place to visit... Couldn't pay me enough to live in either
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope they're paying you for this and you don't really believe what you say. The US may not be doing great, but when it comes to healthcare, pensions, social security, civil liberties, equality, sustainability, workers rights, corruption, China is so far behind in the middle ages, it isn't even a contest.
That's why you see so many white elephants in China. It's much easier to pour concrete into awesome projects with high visibility, where people take home half the project budget in kickbacks. Changing the
Re: The Chinese (Score:5, Informative)
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When you compare American whites with European countries the USA is equal to or better than Europe. Compare Apples to Apples, not Apples to Apples covered with feces.
The USA has a lot more minorities than the rest of "the 1st world" (read: white countries) so just wait until Merkel sends in a few million more refugees. You'll get there soon enough.
I can take you on a trip through the Rust Belt or the Appalachians to disabuse you of of that notion.
You have to look in the right places (Score:1, Troll)
When it comes to those things, the USA is also way behind the rest of the civilised world.
You can find examples where that is true - as you mentioned Detroit, and places like Chicago or New York.
But not every place in the U.S. is run solely by Democrats. Across most of the rest of the country, the people are better balanced, the corruption FAR less than pretty much any place in Europe (not sure what else you might mean by First World that would be any better).
Many schools are run down in the USA, and need
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
When it comes to those things, the USA is also way behind the rest of the civilised world.
US "voter registration" laws in different states are there to block peoples right to vote.
The USA, when compared to the rest of the 1st world does not fare that well at all.
Uh, you do realize that in most of the civilized world what you derisively call "voter registration" laws are the norm, right? The only way the USA is behind the civilized world in that regard is that we have idiots trying to claim that requiring an ID to vote disenfranchises people. Admittedly, it *does* disenfranchise the dead people who tend to vote D, but maybe we don't need their votes.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What does that even mean, aside from some esoteric numbers on graphs and metrics that put people to sleep?
Culturally, the Chinese will never over take the US - it will be a cold day in hell when US or EU kids wake up and think a Chinese app is the next big thing.
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I use lots of Chinese made stuff , buy in thousands a year for both work and personally, as do other people I know.
So feel free to go back to sleep because one day you are going to wake and find that you were wrong.
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Keep believing that, because one day very soon you will find the USA is lagging behind China, India, EU.
They've been saying that for decades. But they still shit in the street in India and most Chinese still live like peasants while whole cities sit empty because China won't let their people have things unless they are well-connected and pay all the right bribes. They have no meaningful consumer protection laws, you can be executed for cheating on your taxes, and the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. This is not an environment that rewards creativity. That's probably also why a larger percentage of Chin
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And that's not to say that you can't decide that his tendency
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Name a country that ISN'T a currency manipulator these days. All are hell-bent on devaluing their currency for the sake of exports and it's a full-on race to the bottom, with the citizens breaking the landing of the fiat chariot.
After 20+ quarters of falling revenue... (Score:2, Insightful)
...The real news here should that IBM has (or had) something worth stealing!
Re: What about VMware? (Score:1)
Is that what they call virtual signalling?
Was it worth the risk? (Score:2)
H1-B (Score:1)
Why is the FBI wasting its time on this (Score:2)
This should be a *civil* case. Why are the FBI and the Justice Department wasting their time on this? It's not the government's job to enforce these companies' ridiculous proprietary, closed-source license agreements.