Google's tax strategy is legal, but disguising UK sales as Irish sales is not.
"Google vice-president Matt Brittin insisted he stood by evidence he gave last year that all the firm's advertising in Europe was sold through its offices in Ireland.
But in a series of testy exchanges, the committee chairman, Margaret Hodge, said his claims were contradicted by documentation MPs had seen and evidence from a "stream" of whistleblowers.
"It was quite clear from all that documentation that the entire trading process and sales process took place in the UK," she told him."
"The committee had also been contacted by a senior salesman who Ms Hodge said was paid a "modest" salary, but three or four times that in commission for sales and for "closing deals".
"This is somebody, a senior salesman, who said he was making sales in the UK. This is a UK sale and should be subject to UK tax," she added.
...Mr Brittin said that although sales staff in the UK were promoting Google and encouraging people to spend money, the transaction would take place in Ireland.
But Ms Hodge replied: "We all accept the billing is in Ireland. If sales activity is taking place in the UK, you are misleading both Parliament and the taxpayers in suggesting that is not happening."
The undergrad class was back in 2011 and just went through the basics using Learning Perl, 5th Edition. I haven't personally been to the workshop here, but from their schedule it looks like they spend several sessions on basic programming concepts then spend one on OOP and hop to BioPerl, interacting with FTP sites, then "practical examples". The lab I know that uses Perl does use Moose though.
Here's something few people seem to be aware of - Taiwan agrees it is part of China (aka 'One China' [1]).
While we often hear about the government in Beijing claiming the island as the sovereign territory of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), we don't hear much about the claims made by the government in Taipei that the mainland is the sovereign territory of the Republic of China (ROC).
Although both sides dispute who is the sole legitimate government of a single China, they both agree that territorially it includes the island of Taiwan. Meanwhile, a recent poll suggests that for people on the ground, opinion is divided.[2]
>Taiwan agrees it is part of China (aka 'One China' [1]).
That is laughably wrong. I say that as someone who's spent half his adult life in Taiwan. Only a very, very slim minority of Taiwanese feel that Taiwan is "part of China". Even the KMT (國民黨）has long given up that stance.
The tension is between those who want to officially (i.e. UN) recognized independence and those accept the status quo of de facto independence in the interests of avoiding a hopeless war with China. Taiwan has never been part of the the PRC. While a significant minority of Taiwanese people hope for a future democratic China, those in favor of unifying with the PRC measure at under 5%.
Yes, I am sure. Taiwan was my home for many years, most of my best friends live there and I still follow the local media in the local language and watched election campaign speeches for multiple candidates in each of the last two elections in person. What about you?
KMT leaders prior to Ma pushed for unification. During Ma's campaign in 2008, he repeatedly emphasized that he would not support any sort or unification or annexation. This created a rift between him, Lian Zhan and the rest of the old guard, but without that assurance he couldn't have won.
"The one China policy" has a specific political meaning -- it's intentionally ambiguous as to what "China" is (a country or a civilization). While the policy isn't exactly loved by most in Taiwan, it allows the peaceful continuance of Taiwan's de facto independence. Any formal break from the policy to formalize this independence is extremely dangerous as the article you linked to points out:
"Beijing has threatened to invade in response to any such declaration."
Also, it's important to point out the role of the US. The US has pledged to treat Taiwan as a country in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, but has stated that any support or defense of Taiwan could end in the case of a formal declaration of independence.
Create a new (viral) software license, the Ethical Public License (EPL). The EPL is linked to the oath and forbids use of the source code in any project or system deemed to break the oath.
This might result in an economic incentive for companies like Path to curb bad behaviour, due to the cost of rewriting EPL code or using inferior code.
Note: The OSI will probably claim the EPL is not an open source license ("No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor") and the FSF will likely say the EPL isn't a free software license because it breaks Freedom 0 ("The freedom to run the program, for any purpose").
Maybe it's time to create a Hippocratic Oath for developers to publicly commit to?
A future Path developer could then refuse to implement an unethical "feature" by pointing out that the company had hired them with the full knowledge that the oath had been undertaken.
I don't think the company would pink slip the developer, as they would probably want to avoid any attention being drawn to the unethical "feature" in a tribunal or other legal setting.
A "Hippocratic Oath for developers" sounds like a great idea, but we vastly underestimate the number of jerkbags in the world.
People want validation. Line-level employees want praise from coworkers and bosses. Executives want praise from their peers, investors, industry, and press. Concepts like ethics, "right," or even this-is-good-for-thie-world isn't a concern when faced with "X will increase my social status and happiness with my peer brogrammers." What's X? It's anything possible, regardless of legal, right, wrong, or ethical.
A nontrivial number of companies use unethical methods (spam, false invites, false installs, phone and email address book capture, fake attractive profiles) to increase their vanity metrics. Employees see those methods as either: "this is bad, but it's sooooo good for us — look at all the lame n00bs who fall for our tricks" or "this is bad, and I'm ashamed to work here."
The ones who feel shame would take the Hippogrammer Oath. Those who revel in manipulating others and standing on their broken bodies will rake in all the profits while the good guys just sit around and "play nice."
Even the tech darlings of today used spammy methods to grow their initial user base. How do you grow your userbase to ten million when you're growing at a constant 5,000 per day? Obviously you want to "go viral." How does one just on a whim "go viral?" You can either become a meme, a social phenomenon, or spam and manipulate unsuspecting people. Spam is less work than creativity.
A lot of the things mentioned there are good reasons for a curated App Store approach. It's almost impossible to stop arbitrary programs from abusing features of the OS on which they run, unless you have control over which ban poorly behaving programs from ever reaching end users.
Alternatively, you can think of it as a good argument for open source. Take abuse of the notification area, for example: in Ubuntu this was eliminated by modifying every package in the archive. That's something a system like Windows with closed components belonging to dozens of different manufactures can't really do.
wow, I (like many others, obviously) have experienced many of the things described in the msdn blog article you linked to, yet never really thought critically that those things don't have to be there!
Things are going to look different to me now when I'm on a windows machine.
Nice post, but putting shortcuts in Quick Launch bar seems pretty standard these days and I like it as long as the installer asks. Also, he mentions the fact a programmer would have to hard code the file path ... I don't see why they couldn't write an algorithm to discover it instead.
I remember having to put my job on the line a few times for refusing to program / setup something awful.
One of the worst was when I was asked to combine all divisions email lists and send out a marketing email selling some overpriced book, this was against the Privacy Act (AU), against our privacy policy and highly unethical to boot, refused and was given a written warning.
It was a contract web development company I was working for, about ten years ago. One of our clients wanted some SEO work done, and my supervisor had recently been reading a lot about SEO. He started out reading white-hat stuff, but by this point he was delving into some black-hat research, and he essentially asked me to program a message-board spam-bot. I just told him straight up that I believed that would be unethical and I refused to do it, knowing full well that simply refusing to do assigned work could cost me job.
Thankfully, not only did this not cost me my job, it caused my supervisor to re-evaluate his own position and he decided to go back into completely white-hat SEO. And in the end, he actually thanked me for refusing to do that work.
> The ones who feel shame would take the Hippogrammer Oath. Those who revel in manipulating others and standing on their broken bodies will rake in all the profits while the good guys just sit around and "play nice."
I think it is important that we should realize this kind of mentality won't work. You might see bad people making money, but eventually it will be no good for them. Either they don't sustain, or the money is no good for them, or they can't sleep with all that money under their pillow. You will see lot of examples of this from history.
I have seen people who are ethical and right also make a lot of profits. May be not in the short term, but in the long term. The idea is, you don't go behind money, instead you do what you do best, and money will come behind you.
I am not a jerkbag yet multiple times I have put my beliefs to one side to implement something I really didn't want to do. It made me sad and demoralized for weeks. Yet the choice between sticking to values and feeding family is not a difficult one to make in the end.
This is why we got mad at the top of the Nazi regime, not the bottom. The workers just needed to feed their families, the ones at the top orchestrated the evils.
There were plenty people at the lower levels of the Nazi regime who were put in trial if they were considered to have committed crimes (e.g. concentration camp guards).
Computers attempted various guises of "can't we all just get along".
At one time, it was cooperative multitasking and memory management. Programs were supposed to behave themselves and get out of one anothers' way. Except that, due to bugs or malice, some didn't. We called this world "DOS" (or pre OSX Macs).
Microsoft still attempts to allow vendors to install programs whereever the hell they want, and to, pretty please, not overwrite other program's infrastructure or system-level DLLs. Yeah. Right.
In the Linux world, we've solved this problem, if done right, though distro-managed, well, distributions. Any program can be included if it meets qualifications (generally limited to licensing requirements), and a sponsor steps up. Once included, the package gets the benefits of being included in the package lists, distributed over archive mirrors, and included in bugtracking and support systems. However it's also got to play along with the requirements of Debian Policy as to how it behaves on a system.
The proper way to address the issues of app privileges is to control privileges centrally on the device and grant them to specific apps. If a user doesn't wish to give an app, say, addressbook access, then they can deny it (or feed it a bogus addressbook). The app vendor can decide what they're going to do at this point, but what they can't do is override the user's explicitly stated limits.
>Maybe it's time to create a Hippocratic Oath for developers to publicly commit to?
This is silly. Stop trying to add grandeur to writing some code at X,Y startup/company.
People don't die or get harmed when some social-messaging application spams someone. Code is a way to implement an idea. Most applications exist to make money. If this a shock to you, read the user agreement before installing/upgrading, uninstall the application, or realize that in social networking, your personal data what the company uses to make a profit.
I disagree. As a computer engineer in Canada, I must swear by the Code of Ethics because what I do (or potentially don't do) can cause harm.
Ethics in computer-science-related fields are important and I think we do need a set of rules we can dogmatically follow like the Hippocratic Oath. Of course, the HO is different in that failing to follow can cause physical harm. However, the world is progressing quickly and more and more information is hosted online -- personal information.
I think it's our jobs to make sure we don't promote poor practice and un-ethical behaviour.
>I think it's our jobs to make sure we don't promote poor practice and un-ethical behaviour.
No, it's our responsibility as decent people. I don't need to sign some online pledge to keep myself from pushing people in front of trains. If I was the sort to harm others, why would I care about some meaningless online campaign?
Well, yes. But there is a reason that every profession that has tackled this problem has used a system of oaths and certification. Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers are the canonical examples.
You need something that is given and can be taken away for bad behaviour in order to change behaviour at this level. Damn human brains.
Taken away by whom and on what basis? I would dispute that you need the ability to take away other individuals' ability to lawfully write software. That ability is bound to be abused for political reasons (which is also what it looks like when people have reasonably different ethical systems and one imposes his by force).
Anyway, the issue at hand is bad corporate behavior, not bad programmers. I don't see why we need to start licking our chops about the prospect of forming a blacklist against individual programmers.
This is just a bonding/licensing arrangement, it's in use by every other profession that has this exact problem.
So go ahead and try and stop bad corporate behaviour, everyone else can use a proven system so that programmers can easily say "no" when asked to do something unethical and not be fired for it.
I'm often confused by how often programmers completely reinvent the wheel when faced with social problems. The idea of looking to other similar industries never comes up, even if the problem is exactly the same.
There's nothing to sign and it's not a campaign. You're right, it is our responsibility as decent people to uphold a certain level of moral and ethical behaviour, especially when the software we write is in control of sensitive information.
The Oath is there to remind you to act in the best interest of the user. There are no formalities and although it seems common sense to people like you and me, others might not see it so clearly.
An engineer holds a license such that they can profess, which license is conditional to the respect of their code of ethics (and a bunch of rules). If they do not follow those conditions, their license can be revoked.
So what if they lose their license? They can still write code and do harm.
Yes, indeed. As it stands right now, the reality of the engineer's license is such that it doesn't fit very well the software world. The vast majority of companies couldn't give less of a damn whether you are licensed or not. However, it depends.
Regulations might eventually come in place to force software producers to hire only licensed engineers if the nature of their business is prone to put the public in danger. And as technology grows ever deeper into our lives, the danger that consumer apps can cause on the public is ever growing as well. For instance, breaching a user's privacy can be enough info to grant an ill-intended operator access to the user's e-mail through social engineering, from which it is then often trivial to gain access to that user's bank informations. You don't need that much imagination to figure out a scenario where a user's life can be turned to shit by some software abuse.
Given that this risk is ever growing, the possibility of a code of ethic on software business is plausible. Say in X months, the government of country Y decides that companies hoping to run a social network available on their territories must hire licensed software-engineers, and have them all sign-off any code that is presented to the public. That software engineer they'd hire would have to put their license and career in jeopardy if they were to implement some evil feature.
Before Québec's bridge, engineers didn't need a license to build infrastructure. The parallel between the current situation and the past isn't too hard to make.
So in Canada, software engineers never cause harm to anyone? Nice to know.
>>>> I think we do need a set of rules we can dogmatically follow like the Hippocratic Oath.
So you don't actually have to employ your own brain and your own moral judgement, because somebody already did it for you and wrote this nice set of rules, that you swore by Apollo to faithfully execute, without thinking, not unlike that box of wires and silicon chips you are paid to play with? Nice arrangement, I suppose.
>>>> I think it's our jobs to make sure we don't promote poor practice and un-ethical behaviour.
I think you're missing the point. The oath is to remind you to use your head, your best judgement and a body of ethics and to act in the interest of the public. Sure engineers still make mistakes, but the code of ethics isn't some magical document that eliminated human error.
Also, I think you're sort of merging the HO with the Code of Ethics for engineers in Canada -- two very different documents and I suggest you give them a read. And no, no one still thinks they're swearing to Apollo.
>>>> The oath is to remind you to use your head, your best judgement and a body of ethics
Why you need an oath for that - shouldn't it be always the default behavior?
>>>> and to act in the interest of the public.
"Interest of the public" is a very dangerous thing. I can remember a lot of very bad things that were done "in the interest of the public". You can make almost anything pass as "in the interest of the public" if you want to. Murder? Millions were murdered "in the interest of the public", because they were of the wrong ethnicity, class, physical features or just in the wrong place in the wrong time. Robbery? Millions were stripped of their property and reduced to utter poverty because it was claimed it is "interest of the public" to do so. And so on, and so forth.
I would rather steer clear of anything that has "interest of the public" written on it, at least until it's very clear what is underneath. Too many things that were underneath such writing proved to be a disaster.
>>> no one still thinks they're swearing to Apollo.
Swearing to a document composed by a faceless bureaucracy is no better. If you have code of ethics, live by it, if you do not - get one. What Apollo or his modern equivalent, the almighty bureaucracy, has to do with it?
One more variation: Nina, On, and Ariely conducted a similar experiment. But, one group was asked to write down 10 books they had read in high school, and the other group was asked to try to recall and write down the 10 Commandments.
When cheating was not possible, the average score was 3.1
When cheating was possible, the book group reported a score of 4.1 (33% cheating)
When cheating was possible, the 10 Commandments group scored 3.1 (0% cheating)
And most of the subjects couldn't even recall all of the commandments! Even those who could only remember 1 or 2 commandments were nearly as honest. "This indicated that it was not the Commandments themselves that encouraged honesty, but the mere contemplation of a moral benchmark of some kind."
Perhaps we can have people sign secular statements--similar to a professional oath--to remind us of our commitment to honesty. So Ariely had students sign a statement on the answer sheet: "I understand that this study falls under the MIT honor system."
Those who signed didn't cheat. Those who didn't see the statement showed 84% cheating.
"The effect of signing a statement about an honor code is particularly amazing because MIT doesn't even have an honor code."
Interesting experiments, the question is if this persists - i.e. if you read the 10 commandments at the beginning of the semester and take the test at the end - would the difference still remain.
"So you don't actually have to employ your own brain and your own moral judgement, because somebody already did it for you and wrote this nice set of rules, that you swore by Apollo to faithfully execute, without thinking, not unlike that box of wires and silicon chips you are paid to play with? Nice arrangement, I suppose."
So I assume you never use any open source code in any of your programming projects, since you are fundamentally opposed to adopting any ideas that are not exclusively your own?
You assume wrong, this in no way follows from what I have said and I never said that I am "fundamentally opposed to adopting any ideas that are not exclusively your own". You must have by accident commented in a wrong branch.
What happens if an app for job seekers texts your boss? What if a casual hookup site texts your new girlfriend--even though you signed up a year before meeting her? What happens if your app calls an old person and they crack a hip trying to answer a phone--when everyone that knows them personally knows not to call until they're awake and their caretaker is in?
These may sound far-fetched, and we all mostly don't pretend we're as disciplined as structural engineers, but "we do it for the money lulz" is a shitty and stupid argument.
I'm okay with this. I'd rather be calculating than have my head in the sand about the business models of social networking what-have-you applications.
>What if a casual hookup site texts your new girlfriend--even though you signed up a year before meeting her?
While I don't and won't have to experience this, your imagined relationship suffers more from lack of trust and honesty than "some dumb app does some dumb, annoying thing."
>"we do it for the money lulz" is a shitty and stupid argument.
Don't Straw Man me. If my code was going to be used for something I perceive as evil, I'd leave the job.
Our industry doesn't need yet another pointless, embarrassing ethics/integrity campaign when the people writing the code don't care.
> People don't die or get harmed when some social-messaging application spams someone.
Of course they get harmed: their time is wasted, and perhaps their concentration disturbed. This is a small harm to each victim, no doubt about it, but if you write code that makes your social-messaging application spam people then you're delivering that small harm to a large number of people. If your code wastes 10 seconds each, just once, for a million people, that's about three person-months of aggregate time you've stolen that will never come back.
It's quite true that "in social networking, your personal data what the company uses to make a profit". But if it were near-universal practice for new software engineers to swear a solemn oath not to use their powers for evil, who knows? perhaps some other business model for social networking might have had a chance to succeed.
People don't die or get harmed when some social-messaging application spams someone.
I disagree. This case reminds me of Geni. You would put a relative's email address in to invite them, and they'd then receive a torrent of spammy "updates", until they registered to unsubscribe.
My less tech-savvy father added many relatives from his address book to Geni. Lots of hate from deranged relatives, and some less technically-inclined relatives are probably still being spammed, 6 years later-it made family gatherings awkward for a while. There are real-world, harmful consequences to this kind of scummy, unethical tactic.
This response assumes that joining all social networks is user choice. Unfortunately, we live in a world where it hurts consumers NOT to be on some networks. LinkedIn (which also has had a history of horrible spamming in the past) is an example - sure, you can choose not to be on it, but you'll probably get dinged by hiring managers because your credentials somehow seem less legitimate if not corroborated by LinkedIn.
if there were such an oath, programmers would write the code and the business will fill it with content..
//It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Engineers have this system already and have had it forever. In Canada (the one I'm familiar with) it is the P.Eng (Professional Engineer) license.
I think the system should be licensing and involve losing that license if you commit an ethics violation.
There would be unlicensed developers of course, but connecting the incentive to not do unethical things with the incentive to be part of the elite class in your profession has worked pretty damn well for Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers.
This is an important sticking point. Maybe a Professional Engineering certification isn't the solution, but let's not get hung up here.
Example: P.E. certified people should have no problem creating weapons systems for a nation-state at war. Does that make it ethical? Depends on who writes the history books afterward.
Example: P.E. certified people might refuse to participate in experimental, unorthodox methods. But especially in software these often become the runaway successes.
In other words _you_ have to own _your_ personal ethics. You won't be able to point and say "I was just following orders!" The pointy-haired boss who gave the orders isn't going to be able to exonerate you of the guilt. Often he doesn't even congratulate you for "doing the right thing." Maybe he'll fire you or give you a bonus – or join you in prison! – but my point is: it's orthogonal to your personal ethics.
Ethics may sometimes appear to conflict with rapid progress. That doesn't necessarily imply an existential crisis, just a lack of forethought. So many ethical problems arise due to overflowing ignorance / lack of forethought combined with a sudden rash of malice (when it comes time to pay the piper). Ethics are a way of expressing realities about the world that conflict with the general Adam Smithian "enlightened self-interest." I view ethics as meta-enlightened self interest – like how Apple is more than just industry-leading, they carved new niches where no one thought to go.
Engineers (software engineers or otherwise) have untangled things much more complicated than this. It's only overwhelming if it blows up in your face.
Path seems like a classic case of all of the above.
Of course. The _whole point_ of _any_ ethical or moral principle is that it directs you to do things that are right even at some possible cost to yourself.
If you believe that standing up for your strongly-held beliefs will get you fired, you should look for a new job _now_. Sure, that incurs the trouble and uncertainty of a job switch, and possibly a pay cut (though perhaps less of that than you think). But if it means that you don't have to be ashamed of what you do all day --- it's generally worth it.
> has worked pretty damn well for Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers.
... and has pretty much screwed over the rest of society, at least in the latter two cases. The legal and medical cartels have done incredible harm to their customers over the years.
I have to say that your link about medicine is short of laughble.
Even if there was some bad "allopathy" back in the day, there is more bad eclictics and homeopathy right now. And to practice medicine you have to understand scientific method, especially falsifability.
And I also have to say that the "free market" idea isn't falsifable. "Let it to free market" rarely works.
They assume rational actors (people making decisions based on their own self interest). That's been falsified (when applied to humans).
Most variations of the efficient market hypothesis have been disproved as well, for the same reasons:
Humans have cognitive biases and other types of irrational behaviour.
But anyone linking to mises.org is probably a follower of the church of the free market. And they generally strongly disagree with the idea that humans have cognitive biases (because their faith requires it not to be true).
I'm glad someone else laughed at the pro-homeopathy / conspiracy theory around the history of snake oil salesmen content on there.
> That's untrue of some schools of economics that advocate free markets, e.g. Austrian.
I took the term "free market 'idea'" to be specifically talking about those for which it's true. That seemed to be the point, and the site linked to was Austrian. Both articles make the assumptions in question about the ability to self-regulate that assumes rational actors. So yes, my statement was not true of all schools, but it seemed like those types of Austrians were not in the scope of the discussion.
> That's an ... interesting ... claim. Care to justify it?
Subjective opinion. I read economics news and neuroscience news because it's interesting. Comment threads, especially here, frequently have two types of subjects that start the vocal libertarians arguing and proclaiming: government regulation and the phrase "humans are irrational".
This may vary by province, but our provincial engineering board will not stand up for you if you get fired due to upholding your code of ethics (they even told us so in ethics class).
Furthermore, whistleblowers are often unemployed for extended periods of time, due to corporations not wanting to hire them as they could be a liability.
The patent language says it's "a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes." Extending this more broadly would say "a commitment to our employees that the code they write can only be used for non-spamming purposes."
The problem, of course, is that it's pretty easy to tell whether a patent is being used defensively or offensively. Defining spam (or more difficult yet, privacy) is a bit more slippery.
This assumes that Path (or any company) would be foolish enough to make their intentions clear.
If a developer refused to implement a feature due to their ethics then the company would do the following:
* Move engineer to different project
* Set unrealistic goals/deadlines/expectations
* After engineer fails, voice concern about performance
* Set up performance review and improvement plan
* After causing engineer to fail a second time due to unrealistic expectations, fire them due to poor performance
Even if that engineer writes a blog post, enough has happened between his initial refusal and termination as to make conclusive proof impossible. The discussion will be a he-said-she-said affair as his former employer makes a counter-blog post explaining the engineer's poor performance.
A lawsuit is similarly out of the question as most companies have sufficient funds to cause delays in court, thereby causing you to spend all your money on attorney fees and bleeding you dry.
Yup. SOP in the food service industry is to give employees who are underperforming 4 hours per week, on the slowest shift, and just leave them there until they quit.
Honestly, if you refuse to do something on ethical grounds and then are moved around, you know what's going on. Most people aren't clueless to office politics and at that point it's your decision to blow the whistle or shut up and watch it happen in spite of your oath.
It's not like hospitals haven't contended with this exact thing for a very long time. The wills of surgeons/doctors and their hospital administrators do not always match up.
How would this be any different from the situation today, where he writes a blog post titled, "Path fired me for not spamming millions of people's phones" and the community rallies around the whistle-blower?
Maybe not, but Apple changed their practices pretty darn quick. They now review suppliers much more closely than they did before, and Foxconn's practices have changed a bit as well. You can argue it didn't have ENOUGH effect, but you can't claim it made no difference.
The goal was not to tank apple, but to improve the working conditions at the factory floor and transparency on apple's part. Apple' supply chain is much more transparent after the noise.
On another note, our outrage/disagreement cannot be outcome based. We hope the bad publicity will change things. many times it does not.
I get your point, but these guys don't have anywhere near the same clout that Apple has.
Path is young (and building a service, not a device/OS) and it can be abandoned for something similar since all they're keeping is data. Once you buy a gadget, that's an investment on your part which will make a lot of people hesitant to give it up and the culture it that surrounds it.
And I wouldn't bet that Apple will be able to survive scandal after scandal and still survive unscathed. Cook is no Jobs.
Arguably, the root cause of Turing’s persecution was that his privacy got invaded, and subsequently the government did not think he had a right to his private conduct.
Though admittedly, no technology was involved in the whole matter.
Also, Turing’s wartime exploits involved a breach of privacy in the service of a good cause.
Arguably, the root cause of Turing’s persecution was that his privacy got invaded, and subsequently the government did not think he had a right to his private conduct.
Actually, come to think of it, if viewed in that way, he's the perfect name for an ethics oath regarding privacy. I hadn't considered it that way.
It would be interesting to combine this with an open source license which links to the Oath, and forbids use of the code in any project or system which breaks the Oath.
For developers who have undertaken the Oath, the challenge would then be to write the best code, so that it sees widespread adoption. This might potentially make it harder for companies like Path to engage in activities which break the Oath.
Once Congress puts a bill forward to deal with this issue, it will be the beginning of the end for this type of behavior. I'm sure Obama will get behind it as well, as it will help the computer market immensely.
"Don't be evil" has never really worked, despite best intentions, depending on your vantage point.
You don't need an official Oath or for the company to know or base their employment on such an Oath. Either way, the bottleneck is the employee drawing attention to the company doing something unethical; no Oath has to get in the way of that. There's already a sub-thread on top-secret/weapons/armaments jobs. What about political ethics? And religious? Marriage / gay rights? Porn? "Sexism?"
So should a software developer's code include armaments, or not?
If it does, it would never get mainstream acceptance; if it doesn't, but does cover the topic of this post, it will be ethically absurd.
I don't see how this is a straw man; when building a professional code, one has to choose what actions to allow or disallow, and this seems like a topic that would obviously come up. What do you think about this scenario misrepresents the idea of a developer's professional code?
This is an internal debate I've had with myself since reading Bernard William's Objections to Utilitarianism [0].
I've never had to actually face the ethical dilemma of developing weapons, but what if the development improved precision on a missile? If we can ignore the question as to whether a missile is ethical or not, developing a better guidance system for a missile will help limit collateral damage, but could increase the "comfort-level" of using the weapon for those who decide such things, therefore increasing overall death/destruction. Utilitarianism is hard, because taking all factors into account is impossible. Kind of like machine learning.
I will never scoff at someone who turns down work for ethical objections, but some people are more pragmatic than others.
Both of Williams examples are really hard to wrap your head around if you accept the situations as presented. They are similar to a Sophies Choice [1]
This is a divergence, but it seems to ignore the value that comes from propagating the meme that building armament systems is unethical by refusing to participate in it.
While the idea of an oath may be flawed, I do think it's about time some segments of the tech field showed a little less contempt towards users. I don't know how that would happen, but launching your own startup shouldn't give you carte blanche to exploit your users however you see fit.
As a programmer, I don't want a bunch of charlatans in SF to give my career an unsavoury reputation because of these antics.
You worked for CME right? Quite ironic given we're discussing LIBOR rigging which has its roots in a decision made by the CME, subsequently exploited by traders.
"In late 1996, Marcy Engel, then a lawyer for Wall Street heavyweight Salomon Brothers Inc, fired off a warning letter to U.S. regulators: If they approved a Chicago Mercantile Exchange plan to change how a popular futures contract was priced, they would put at risk the integrity of a key interest rate in the global financial system."
"The problem with the CME's plan, as Engel saw it: The banks that set the rates in London daily were also able to take positions in the CME's Eurodollar contract. In her letter to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, she said tethering the futures contract to Libor "might provide an opportunity for manipulation" of the interest rate. A "bank might be tempted to adjust its bids and offers ... to benefit its own positions."
Don't write this way here. Don't take disagreements with people and escalate them to innuendo about the character of the people who disagree with you. Don't try to track down where people work, and then fling a narrative at them about how they're somehow corrupted by their employer.
I'd like to think that if I did that myself --- it's possible I have, I'm a pretty undisciplined guy --- I'd apologize for it as soon as it was pointed out.
I think the Parent's comment could be taken either as a underhanded slander as you represent, or viewed that people can have naive perspectives while undermining their own interests.
It's always baffled me that people think I'm sinister because I once worked for the CME.
* Exchanges don't do "evil finance things". Exchanges are middlemen; not only are conflicts of interest legally prohibited, but also an easy way to lose business. LIBOR rigging was not good news for the CME.
* I have about as much loyalty to my former employer as any other hacker would have to a big corporation--that is, I think it's a valuable business, but I'm not going to go on the Internet and shill for them because of some sense of loyalty.
But finance discussion causes people to enter "good vs evil" mode. Go figure.
To call CME irrelevant is strange - it's the world’s largest futures exchange! The CME decision many years ago to link futures contracts to LIBOR may have inadvertently kick-started the entire scandal, because banks responsible for fixing LIBOR would also have trading positions, and thus might be tempted to rig things (which is what happened).
> Exchanges don't do "evil finance things".
Ask farmers: "...rampant dairy price rigging that occurs at the CME and hurts farmers and consumers across the U.S. and around the world. In 2008 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) found Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) guilty of price rigging at the CME and levied an unprecedented $12 million fine. Yet, these illegal trading practices continue at the CME."http://familyfarmers.org/?p=731
Or bullion traders: "As the operator of U.S. commodity futures markets; the CME Group has a quasi-regulatory capacity to ensure the markets are operated in a legitimate manner. A primary facet of this responsibility is to set “margin requirements” for trading positions in a manner which enhances market stability. However, for the second time in 24 months we have this market operator engaging in precisely the opposite manner: maliciously rigging margin position requirements in order to increase the current “instability” in precious metals markets – i.e. the downward pressure in prices."http://wallstreetsectorselector.com/2013/04/cme-group-destab...
> finance discussion causes people to enter "good vs evil" mode. Go figure.
Maybe farmers and bullion traders are just bad losers. Maybe brokers don't front-run their customers. Maybe banks who settle lawsuits are innocent. Or maybe Matt Taibbi is right and people have simply had enough of rampant financial fraud that goes unpunished.
So because two blog posts suggest that the upper management of one of the most important market operators in the world --- one without which those farmers would probably be screwed, by the way --- anybody who in the past worked at CME must be suspicious? Because that's what you're asserting.
The weird thing about this comment is that you appear to have researched it. You researched an attempt to defame another commenter on HN.
Someone else[1] first mentioned that the original poster once worked for CME. Anyone who has been following the LIBOR rigging story can see the irony.
You've now accused several people of defaming the original poster. Did you somehow forget that the topic of discussion is fraud in the financial markets?
You mean "finance discussions" from people who owed their income to the finance industry...and yet who want us to believe they are unbiased on the topic of the finance industry...this despite their well-thought out "discussion" in this thread of a criticism of the financial industry consisting not of any factual arguments, but only of completely unsupported horseshit like...wait for it... "Taibbi routinely lies..."?
I mean how could anyone even consider the idea "shill", is that what you're saying?
In neither of those cases would the comment be welcome, as both would be targeted at a participant in the discussion and not the ideas in their comment.
Ok self-appointed HN comment cop, maybe you could make a ruling for us on top-voted HN comments which consists of nothing more than a mindless, unsupported assertion that the Rolling Stone article author "routinely lies", followed by a comment from someone else whose deep contribution is that the author "writes from a script?"
I mean, with the quality and depth of those kinds of comments, why would anyone ever even think to speculate about motivation and/or character here?
The funny thing about this comment and the rest of your comments on this thread is that they're in militant support of demonizing other commenters because of where they've worked in the past.
But maybe you, alone among all the other (I suppose) Taibbi advocates on this thread, would like to engage directly with my argument about his financial reporting?
"Google vice-president Matt Brittin insisted he stood by evidence he gave last year that all the firm's advertising in Europe was sold through its offices in Ireland.
But in a series of testy exchanges, the committee chairman, Margaret Hodge, said his claims were contradicted by documentation MPs had seen and evidence from a "stream" of whistleblowers.
"It was quite clear from all that documentation that the entire trading process and sales process took place in the UK," she told him."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/16/google-deni...
"The committee had also been contacted by a senior salesman who Ms Hodge said was paid a "modest" salary, but three or four times that in commission for sales and for "closing deals".
"This is somebody, a senior salesman, who said he was making sales in the UK. This is a UK sale and should be subject to UK tax," she added.
...Mr Brittin said that although sales staff in the UK were promoting Google and encouraging people to spend money, the transaction would take place in Ireland.
But Ms Hodge replied: "We all accept the billing is in Ireland. If sales activity is taking place in the UK, you are misleading both Parliament and the taxpayers in suggesting that is not happening."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hmrc-are-being...