

The Cold War in high frequency trading turns hot - ftse
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/07/10/61361/the-cold-war-in-high-frequency-trading-turns-hot/

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ajross
I love it when journalists are forced to cover low level technical details in
order to explain something important:

 _Aleynikov claims to have created a tarball - a Unix aggregate of a number of
files (like a .zip file) [...]. He says he encrypted the files, then erased
the encryption software, the tarball and the bash history — which is basically
a back up of the Unix commands used to amalgamate and transfer the files.
Goldman’s security server, however, apparently prevents or at least alerts the
company to bash deletions_

You can just picture the author carefully writing down someone's explanation
of what the .bash_history file is, and their source's frustration with their
inability to grok a totally obvious idea. "... so it's like a backup, right?".
"No! Well, sorta. But that's not what it's for."

On the other hand, the monitoring for deletions of .bash_history seems like a
niftily paranoid idea/. I know I'd never expect the IT department of a
financial services company to have thought that far ahead, or even to know how
command histories persist across shells.

~~~
Devilboy
With the amount of money at stake here, I'd almost expect a CCTV camera
pointed at every computer screen in the building!

