

The War On Hackers - rukshn
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/26/the-war-on-hackers/

======
cdooh
This should be upvoted simply because it's a article on Techcrunch that does
really involve a company's latest funding round, VC's or an app.

But on a more serious note what the post talks about is worrying we can't have
computer illiterate people making laws and decisions that could have far
reaching implications on how we use computers.

------
tptacek
Are you kidding me? No, of course you aren't. Of course we're reading
TechCrunch playing blog-telephone with a story that _started out_ with a
terribly misinformed blog post.

Original comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6595993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6595993)

Things to know:

No, a judge did not order Thuen's laptop siezed because he was a "hacker".

No, the fact that Thuen claimed to be a hacker did not play into whether
Thuen's laptop was examined and imaged.

No, Thuen did not simply leave Batelle to create an open-source version of his
project.

There are no similarities between Thuen's case and Swartz's.

What happened here is straightforward. Thuen was an employee of Batelle. He
was a developer on Batelle's "Sophia" project. While working for Batelle, he
commenced work on his own version of "Sophia", called "Visdom". Batelle fired
him. He took "Visdom" and created a new company, "Southfork", which sponsored
"Visdom" as an open source project. Batelle sued, and Thuen admitted copying
at least some components from "Sophia". Batelle prevailed in a preliminary
injunction to have "Visdom" taken down, and, in the ongoing suit, made a
discovery request for an image Thuen's laptop. The court agreed, as is routine
in civil cases, with the proviso that the image be delivered directly to the
court for escrow and not examined directly by Batelle.

There is an annoying wrinkle to this story: the judge did use Thuen's
statements about being a hacker as justification for the idea that Thuen might
spoil the evidence on the hard drive _once notified about the discovery
request_ ; Batelle's outside forensic investigator was therefore not required
to give advance notice to Thuen. But that is the only thing that the word
"hacker" determined in this case.

It is absolutely bog standard for hard drive images to constitute discoverable
evidence in civil cases, and it is not at all surprising that an full time
software developer might get sued for copying their employer's product (even
if it didn't share code, which apparently _isn 't_ the case here).

Jim Denaro read an earlier stage of this game of telephone in Ars Technica and
called it "dangerously wrong about the law"; the facts of this case are even
more attenuated in TechCrunch, which _does not give a shit if you know what is
actually happening_ , and is running this story solely to generate rageviews.

~~~
nhamann
I'm hesitant to bring this up since you seem much more informed about this
topic, but your statement "Thuen admitted copying at least some components
from 'Sophia'" seems to contradict Thuen's statement from the TechCrunch
article:

"Visdom is not a translation of Sophia from C to the languages in which Visdom
is written. We did not have the Sophia code when we created Visdom."

So I'm interested in what you mean by "copy".

~~~
tptacek
My information comes from the court order, which states directly that Thuen
admitted to some kind of copying (what kind, we do not know).

~~~
rezendi
Uh, no - it states that Battelle claims this, not that the court has found
this to be a fact. Kind of a huge difference.

