greenrom - Slashdot User

Submission + - How to deal with stolen code 2

Submitted by greenrom on Wednesday November 28, 2007 @02:08PM

greenrom writes: I work for a small company as a software developer. While investigating a bug in one of our products, I found source code on a website that was nearly identical to code used in our product. Even the comments were the same. It's obvious that a developer at our company found some useful code on the web and copied it. The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code. It's just 200 lines of code the author posted in a forum.

Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license? If not, what's the best way to deal with this kind of situation? Since I'm now the only person working on this code, there's no practical way to report the situation confidentially. I'm new to the company, and the developer who copied the code is the project lead. Reporting him to management doesn't seem like a good career move. I could rewrite the copied code without reporting him, but since the product is very close to release it would be difficult to make a significant change without providing some justification.

Rethinking the MMOG 163

Posted by Zonk on Monday March 26, 2007 @02:13PM from the do-it-better-and-make-it-funner dept.

Gamasutra is running a piece right now called Rethinking the MMO. Game designer Neil Sorens takes issue with some of the consistent blights on the traditional Massive gaming experience, like the phenomenon of the 'ordinary' hero, and the extremely large time investment required to 'get anywhere'. Though he doesn't offer a lot in the way of concrete solutions to these issues, his appraisal of the genre is sure to spark a few conversations: "As long as developers and publishers do nothing but copy what is successful, they--and gamers--will continue to miss out on these games' staggeringly awesome potential. And as long as [MMOGs] are designed by and for stat geeks (whom I know and love and sometimes am) with little regard for traditional game design fundamentals, they will continue to waste that potential."

Submission + - Are false positives hurting you?

Submitted by

Gerald

on Monday February 12, 2007 @02:21PM

Gerald writes: "After the most recent Wireshark release a certain AV vendor's product started warning users that the installer contained adware. Since then, I've spent several hours verifying this isn't the case, trying to get the AV vendor to fix their stuff, and reassuring affected users that we do not ship adware with our product.

Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated case. I've had to do this several times over the past few years, and each incident uses up time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's even worse for other projects. If you produce software, have you ever suffered collateral damage from AV false positives?"

Submission + - AACS broken for all HD and Blu-ray disks

Submitted by on Monday February 12, 2007 @11:26AM

An anonymous reader writes: Two months after Muslix64 initially publicized his method for getting AACS keys, a user on Doom9 has found the processing key, which is able to decrypt all disks for both formats released thus far. The exploit can even be reused for future keys. This will allow the creation of a one-click backup utility and is a major blow against DRM.

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