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I’m disappointed they found so much in his search history. Do these people not have phones? In this day and age with everyone carrying a smartphone, there’s no excuse for using work computers for personal activities
Weird that these protections exist for corporations that aren't actually people but no protections exist for the person who was fired.
Exactly my thought. A corporation destroys people's lives by firing them? Nothing. Someone actually pushes back? Suddenly the government gets involved.
I don't see how pretending that's weird is gonna help anyone.
We all know we don't live in a just world.
We need to try and make it one, instead of pretending we're living in one which happens to have horrid injustice happening all the time.
Tbh, what shocks me the most about this is how sloppy this appears to have been executed.
Talk about incentivizing us to make even more impactful kill switches!
Up to 10 years is crazy. Sure, what he did was wrong, planned and malicious, and they claim it cost them tens of thousands of dollars. But 10 years? This is crazy for something that at worst would be a yearly salary of a single employee.
Fucking capitalism.
"Up to 10 years" is the maximum possible for that type of crime. Actual sentencing guidelines for a $500k loss for a first time offender will probably come out to about 2, maybe 3 years.
In order for the recommended sentence to hit 10 years, we'd have to be talking about damage of over $550 million, or something like a long criminal history.
Substantial disruption of critical infrastructure would get someone to around 5 years, as a reference.
allegedly costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.
Also it's sabotage, which might attract heavier penalties than mere theft?
Actually for federal sentencing, property destruction is punished under the same table as theft. It's mostly measured from the amount of loss to the victims, whether the person actually profited from it or not.
Lol everyone probably fantasizes about such thing sometimes, but even if you weren't caught, it's not worth it to personally be bitter like that.
Just got laid off and could had done the same. Except I don't have to. Internal systems are so bad and undocumented and I was like only IT specialist there who could use linux, and so many things related to core businesses were just basically behind me.
The kill switch has made it self. Funny how I would have written more documentation if I ever was given the time.
but even if you weren't caught, it's not worth it to personally be bitter like that.
Really depends on what you do for a living... Non-profit? Sure. Weapons manufacturer? Fucking have at it.
But don't be stupid about it. Stash a date somewhere that you manually update every so often (so that it'll stop being updated if you're fired) and then add a bunch of random waits whose durations scale with the time since that date. If you're worried that the code will be found, comment it with some bullshit about avoiding race conditions.
...and now I can't use that idea, since this comment would be used in court. If I did it to a weapons manufacturer, they'd probably get the death penalty somehow.
Fair but I wouldn't ever work for weapons manufacturing. Also sabotage in that context would have heavy punishment, and at worst could cause collateral damage.
I was using that as an example because it was the worst thing that came to mind. There is a whole gradient between non-profit and weapons manufacturer.
Same for my last job. My bosses and managers harassed and insulted me. They said I was useless and stupid.
I quit with 3 months of "notice" (standard in France to help you find a new job). They didn’t care during those 3 months. In the last week they panicked because they could not find a replacement that did everything I fixed every day.
I also interviewed my replacement, a junior out of school with big diplomas. When I asked if he knew Linux, he said "not really." I thought "they are fucked with this guy." They wanted to hire him because he was the son of some guy. I said to my boss that he would be a perfect fit for the company.
Unknowingly I was the kill switch. I sent them one last email with all the information they needed and told them to go fuck themselves in a polite way.
malicious compliance, I like it
I didn't plant anything and I could still brick the production backends of a former employer because some poor ass decisions were made when choosing technologies and then when I pointed it out that it's pretty bad the technology was stuck with so literally all it takes is sending 2-3 requests so all pods die.
But why do it.
Similar cases with my old company. In my case people who would had suffered the most direct consequences would had been my colleagues who I respect.
But I could totally cause trouble without any backdoor access.
For the last time, I didn't leave a kill switch -- I just refused to document anything!
You are truly a madman
Edit: or a madlady
M'lady
So when company do it it's fine but when we do it to companies it's not?
Literally the same day as HP *activating a "kill switch" code for their printers.
Naturally. Advantage, privilege and money should only be in the hands of those who run large companies or better.
If that made you angry, bear in mind that's what most top level company executives think. Well, actually they don't think it, they know it unconsciously as the true order of the universe they inhabit and they get really uncomfortable should it even look vaguely like someone might be trying a competing philosophy to their own.
To be fair though, most people get really uncomfortable when something might undermine even part of the philosophy they live by.
I worked for a company once that installed a remote-activation killswitch in their drivers, as a secret weapon to force the customer to stay current on their maintenance contract.
The CEO was a fuckup however, and the code killed their system even without being activated - resulting in a bunch of angry phonecalls and some of the most egregious lying I've ever heard.
god, he was a piece of shit
Sounds like lawsuit territory