4 ms·

Great, who from PayPal is going to jail over this?

bloomingeek 8mo ago
I've been thinking this way for several years now, what a fool I was! Corporations are the elite of society now. They can't fail, they pay off everyone of any importance, i.e., not you or I. The dog and pony show in congress involving FB is further proof they can do no wrong as long as they explain the law to the dolts in congress. (While being watched by SCOTUS, who are laughing their asses off.) The rule of the corporate thumbs for several decades now is: it's more profitable to pay a fine then follow the law. (And if congress isn't keeping up with current tech which needs new laws to protect consumers, who cares?)
- chrneu 8mo ago
  They're people but also not people! Lol what an amazing con the oligarchs managed to pull. They get to reap all the rewards of their parasitic selfish behavior with basically none of the risk. Just make a corp.
zer00eyz 8mo ago
Wow! Lets take the article at face value: "The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers' access to the data one day after discovering the breach." Great thats your bug. Key word here being BUG. Your name next to the commit that caused this. Should you go to prison? Probably not. Tell me you never had a bug, a security hole, never took production down. Never made a mistake. Tell me that you want to go to jail for human error. Not intent, error.
- erremerre 8mo ago
  When a bridge falls, there is a case in the courts, and sometimes engineers go to prison. Why shall be different with code?
  - isatty 8mo ago
    I don’t know about civil engineering but don’t people only go to jail for negligence or worse? Similarly, if the change was a bug, write a postmortem, find ways to make the whole and move on. If it was malicious, then prosecute. I doubt it was malicious though.
  - sonofhans 8mo ago
    Not OP, but 40 years in software, so here’s your answer — abstraction is the essence of programming. Get good enough at this, with a poor moral compass, and you can justify your code doing anything with no accountability whatsoever. Corporate software engineers learn early on that they’re only responsible for their keystrokes (e.g., bug tickets, code formatting), not for the effects of their work (e.g., more efficient distribution of child pornography). Most developers are so inured to this that they react defensively by reflex to any suggestion that their code should have done _anything_ other than what it did. They’re not responsible, see?
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    The defense for the civil engineer is that his design was in accordance with usual and customary engineering standards. If he did something unusual or new, he might be liable if that was the root cause of the failure. If he signed off on a sound design, he's probably OK. Should work the same with software. The problem is that nobody learns that, schools don't teach it (school isn't even required to be a software developer), and there are no licencing bodies that set and enforce the standards. And, ultimately, most software failures don't cause death or injury.
    - erremerre 8mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-22/samsung-mobile-devices-triple-0-telstra-network/105920816 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-22/samsung-mobile-device... We don't know also most of the software failures that cause death. Pretending that bugs don't kill people is not the way forward to solve the issue of having bugs in absolutely everything we have to deal with, sometimes by force.
- timmytokyo 8mo ago
  Accountability is for suckers, I guess.

I've been thinking this way for several years now, what a fool I was! Corporations are the elite of society now. They can't fail, they pay off everyone of any importance, i.e., not you or I. The dog and pony show in congress involving FB is further proof they can do no wrong as long as they explain the law to the dolts in congress. (While being watched by SCOTUS, who are laughing their asses off.) The rule of the corporate thumbs for several decades now is: it's more profitable to pay a fine then follow the law. (And if congress isn't keeping up with current tech which needs new laws to protect consumers, who cares?)

chrneu 8mo ago
They're people but also not people! Lol what an amazing con the oligarchs managed to pull. They get to reap all the rewards of their parasitic selfish behavior with basically none of the risk. Just make a corp.

zer00eyz 8mo ago

Wow! Lets take the article at face value: "The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers' access to the data one day after discovering the breach." Great thats your bug. Key word here being BUG. Your name next to the commit that caused this. Should you go to prison? Probably not. Tell me you never had a bug, a security hole, never took production down. Never made a mistake. Tell me that you want to go to jail for human error. Not intent, error.

erremerre 8mo ago
When a bridge falls, there is a case in the courts, and sometimes engineers go to prison. Why shall be different with code?
- isatty 8mo ago
  I don’t know about civil engineering but don’t people only go to jail for negligence or worse? Similarly, if the change was a bug, write a postmortem, find ways to make the whole and move on. If it was malicious, then prosecute. I doubt it was malicious though.
- sonofhans 8mo ago
  Not OP, but 40 years in software, so here’s your answer — abstraction is the essence of programming. Get good enough at this, with a poor moral compass, and you can justify your code doing anything with no accountability whatsoever. Corporate software engineers learn early on that they’re only responsible for their keystrokes (e.g., bug tickets, code formatting), not for the effects of their work (e.g., more efficient distribution of child pornography). Most developers are so inured to this that they react defensively by reflex to any suggestion that their code should have done _anything_ other than what it did. They’re not responsible, see?
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  The defense for the civil engineer is that his design was in accordance with usual and customary engineering standards. If he did something unusual or new, he might be liable if that was the root cause of the failure. If he signed off on a sound design, he's probably OK. Should work the same with software. The problem is that nobody learns that, schools don't teach it (school isn't even required to be a software developer), and there are no licencing bodies that set and enforce the standards. And, ultimately, most software failures don't cause death or injury.
  - erremerre 8mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-22/samsung-mobile-devices-triple-0-telstra-network/105920816 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-22/samsung-mobile-device... We don't know also most of the software failures that cause death. Pretending that bugs don't kill people is not the way forward to solve the issue of having bugs in absolutely everything we have to deal with, sometimes by force.
timmytokyo 8mo ago
Accountability is for suckers, I guess.