US programmer outsourced own work to China, played on Internet

A rather ingenious programmer, working for a critical infrastructure company in the US, outsourced his work to a Chinese contractor for a fraction of his salary. He then sat and played on Facebook, ebay and reddit and watched cat videos all day.

The unnamed programmer, dubbed "Bob" by the media, was earning a six-figure salary. He handed over his login information to a Chinese firm, giving them full access to do his work, then sat back and played, including watching cat videos, participating on Facebook and reddit.

His cover got blown by an audit, which revealed an active virtual private network (VPN) between "Bob's" workstation and the firm in Shenyang, China. Company executives, suspecting a breach in their security system, then requested an audit from Operations Verizon. 

Andrew Valentine, a spokesman for Verizon, said, "Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area,” adding that “he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about $50,000 annually."

According to Verizon, the employee had sent his security credentials via Fedex to the Chinese firm, giving them access to log on with his username during working hours. 

Verizon also uncovered hundreds of PDF files and invoices exchanged between "Bob" and the contractor in Shenyang.

Valentine said that, "Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day.” 

Apparently the contractor in Shenyan had been working for "Bob" for several months and even had access to classified files of the “critical infrastructure company.” All this just begs the question, what did "Bob" actually do all day? The company had a look at his Internet browsing history, which revealed that he spent hours surfing reddit, updating Facebook and generally surfing the Web for cat videos.  

CNN has posted a typical working day in the life of "Bob": 

9:00 a.m. - Get to work, surf reddit, watch cat videos 

11:30 a.m. - Lunch 1:00 p.m. - ebay  

2:00 p.m or so - Facebook and LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. - Send end-of-day e-mail update to management 

5:00 p.m. - Go home 

The funny thing is, official performance figures for the company show that "Bob" was the most productive developer in the building. He was also described as “inoffensive, quiet” and talented, and is apparently fluent in several different programing languages. All sounds good, except, of course, he wasn't actually doing the work.

After the story broke in the media, there was a mixture of reactions, with some praising "Bob" for his ingenuity, and others, mainly in China, being more critical of his actions. 

Users of the Chinese Twitter-style social network Weibo, were particularly upset with one commenter writing, “Learn English and let’s find work in US. Why do we have to do the dirty work for such a cheap price in China?"

While "Bob's" real identity is still unknown, it has rather unsurprisingly been reported that he no longer works for the company, and it is pretty certain that the Chinese company has been fired too.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/341518

Aaron Swartz, computer activist & reddit co-owner has committed suicide

26-year-old computer activist, co-owner of reddit and co-author of the widely-used RSS 1.0 specification, Aaron H. Swartz, committed suicide in New York City on Friday.

This is according to a comment by Michael Wolf, Swartz's uncle, to The Tech.

Confirmation was received from Swartz's attorney, Elliot R. Peters by email: “The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true.”

At the age of 14, Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification. 

26-year-old Swartz is famous for allegedly downloading documents from the JSTOR online journal archive with the intent to distribute them and was indicted in July 2011. Swartz reportedly pleaded not guilty to this and was released on US$100,000 unsecured bail.  If charged he would have faced a potential prison term of 35 years and a fine up to US$1 million.

After this, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he obtained employment with the Avaaz Foundation, which is a non-profit “global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere.” 

Swartz is one of three co-owners of the popular social news site reddit, and also completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

In 2010, Swartz founded DemandProgress.org, which "works to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing, and grassroots lobbying. In particular, we tend to focus on issues of civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform." The group was active recently with a campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA, and now has over a million members.

Swartz also developed the website theinfo.org which provides free access to public records. He has also been widely cited for his landmark analysis of Wikipedia, Who Writes Wikipedia? Swartz further worked with web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, at MIT, where he helped develop and popularize standards for sharing data on the Web. 

CNET reports that a friend of Swartz, Cory Doctorow, said today that Swartz had battled depression for several years. 

"To the world: we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it," Doctorow wrote.

Read more: http://digitaljournal.com/article/341136