>I have a passing understanding of the policies and procedures binding on developers at trading firms.

I've never set foot in one, but one thing I have learned watching this incident and others is that some of theses firms have varying degrees of carelessness and cluelessness within their businesses; especially with respect to IT (Knight Capital comes to mind). In that respect, they are like any other company, some careful and fastidious, some, flying on a wing and a prayer.

>This is the code we, as security testers, were never allowed to see, even after owning up the machines hosting it. These firms are not kidding around about this stuff.

I may often disagree with some of your opinions here, but I can't say that I have the impression that you're not competent within your profession or that you lack integrity. It occurs to me that the firms that would hire your firm to audit them as opposed to some lesser outfit, are the same firms that run a pretty tight ship in their own businesses. Has it occurred to you that not all trading firms or even divisions within the same company are cut from the same cloth?

>These are firms where you can be fired for plugging a thumb drive into your computer

Yeah, I've seen some companies with ridiculously conservative IT policies. I can see it being applied at a bank or a trading firm. The policies are often meaningless though, when the policies basically state that you can be fired for doing anything, but in reality that doesn't happen. I've worked at one of those companies where a too-large portion of engineering's time was spent circumventing IT systems, activities for which one could've been fired. Those companies always have plenty of ways to fire people.

>I also dispute the idea that because developers commonly use ssh, gzip, and svn, that it is common practice to

I remember about ten years ago working with an engineer whose idea of a source code revision control system was to zip up and password protect source code archives. It may not be common, and Aleynikov wasn't doing it for the same reasons, but by itself, it isn't proof of anything nefarious.

>There was more than sufficient evidence presented at trial, however, for a rational juror to

Interestingly, none of the jurors were employed in tech, and none had a college degree. Not that it would always be necessary, but it is worth considering the possibility that none of them understood what they were being told. It's hard for me to agree that situation was rational unless those were some exceptional high school graduates.

>But this is a forum full of software developers. Rayiner is a lawyer and a compiler developer. It's somewhat insulting to everyone's intelligence to pretend that people here are unfamiliar with ssh and svn.

If you or Rayiner don't like my tone, I'll tell you that I think it is a bit of an embarrassment to have to point some of these things out here. Maybe Rayiner will have enough respect in the future not to parrot statements from the FBI's and the prosecutor's press releases. We've all been spectators here of a number of high profile prosecutions of software developers, and if there is anything to be learned from those experiences, it is that prosecutors and FBI agents will characterize the suspect/defendant in the most damning light possible. Anything that one of them says has to be taken with a grain of salt.

>We understand how software development works. What happened here was extremely sketchy.

Probably so, but not necessarily so, and not on the basis of some of the things ITT.

>You can't play the "well in the world of software development, this is totally normal" card on HN.

It is laughable. I'm probably one of the least qualified people to lecture to this audience, but here it is.