The streaming part or the downloading/looking at code?
You can look at leaked source code for educational purposes in most places (not legal advice). As far as I understand leaks are commonly used in vulnerability research for example (if the bad guys can use it so can bug hunters).
Streaming copyrighted material is a separate issue - but using it for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching" should fall under fair use, no?
What's wrong with looking at public code? The code is public, regardless of how it became public - this isn't someone's personal life being exposed. If twitch is damaged by streaming this, it's only because their poor code quality is being examined publicly.
I can certainly understand why twitch banned this and don't blame them (although I think it's stupid), but I see nothing unethical about openly talking about this code in the public now that it's already there.
> What's wrong with looking at public code? The code is public, regardless of how it became public
Copyright would disagree with you, and I would say that ethically it is basically the same as stealing it yourself. You're profiting off of someone else having done the dirty work for you.
> this isn't someone's personal life being exposed.
Apparently a lot of payment information, telephone numbers, etc. was also in the leak. I don't think we should downloading or encouraging people to download and peruse that stuff.
> You're profiting off of someone else having done the dirty work for you.
I don't think anybody is streaming this stuff on twitch with the intention to make money, anymore than someone sharing it on a blog is trying to make money. Sure, in that edge case I'd agree with you, but it seems like the exception to the rule (after all people can just go look at the code themselves for free). I'm not talking about the guy who stole the code and is likely ransoming Amazon with it - I'm talking about people that just like to talk about code because it's something they like to do (there's an entire category for it on twitch already).
> Apparently a lot of payment information, telephone numbers, etc. was also in the leak. I don't think we should downloading or encouraging people to download and peruse that stuff.
My limited understanding is none of this information actually has been leaked yet, and is likely part of a future ransom (I could be wrong, I haven't looked because I don't care). I don't condone sharing that either, but that's not what the guy streaming was sharing. I'm talking about discussing the source code which is already publicly available.
> Copyright would disagree with you
I know very little about copyright so I'll just assume you're right. I still see no ethical problem with openly discussing this code publicly though. Anyway, agree to disagree.
It's likely lots of bubble gum and chicken wire. I'm sure in the video ingest and transcode side of things there are some really interesting bits though. When you're owned by Amazon you don't need to optimize too much to achieve web scale... just leverage AWS services. It's not like you're going to get a bill.
> When you're owned by Amazon you don't need to optimize too much to achieve web scale... just leverage AWS services. It's not like you're going to get a bill.
Oh you're be surprised. Divisions get billed constantly for the AWS resources they consume, and this bill gets taken out of their annual budget. From what I hear, this is a common practice in most large organizations.
Also, the AWS services you can access from within Amazon are almost identical to the AWS services you can access as an external customer. It's equally easy/hard for a random company to achieve web scale, compared to Twitch.
Oops, didn't mean to be too too negative.
I say embarrassing in the sense of, I've definitely shoved out awful code because something needed to get out(tm). And with large companies, deadlines that cause that situation are inevitable.
But I also say it like that because, well, I've seen code that causes (objectively easy-to-fix) crashes but still ships because of one reason or another: laziness, politics, inexperience. It's a part of software engineering I'm still trying to accept.
Yep, there are lots of small services that don't seem production ready in the source code. Though admittedly we don't know which of those are deprecated.
It is really fun to go through the source code. You'll find interesting architecture diagrams, documentation etc. It's like joining a new job and being amazed how a service you actually use was build.
https://www.twitch.tv/deepfrieddev