The Cold War in high frequency trading turns hot

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/07/10/61361/the-cold-war-in-high-frequency-trading-turns-hot/

by ftse • 17 years ago

15 2 17 years ago

ftalphaville.ft.com

ajross• 17 years ago

I love it when journalists are forced to cover low level technical details in order to explain something important:

Aleynikov claims to have created a tarball - a Unix aggregate of a number of files (like a .zip file) [...]. He says he encrypted the files, then erased the encryption software, the tarball and the bash history — which is basically a back up of the Unix commands used to amalgamate and transfer the files. Goldman’s security server, however, apparently prevents or at least alerts the company to bash deletions

You can just picture the author carefully writing down someone's explanation of what the .bash_history file is, and their source's frustration with their inability to grok a totally obvious idea. "... so it's like a backup, right?". "No! Well, sorta. But that's not what it's for."

On the other hand, the monitoring for deletions of .bash_history seems like a niftily paranoid idea/. I know I'd never expect the IT department of a financial services company to have thought that far ahead, or even to know how command histories persist across shells.

Devilboy• 17 years ago

With the amount of money at stake here, I'd almost expect a CCTV camera pointed at every computer screen in the building!

The Cold War in high frequency trading turns hot

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