Friday, October 25, 2013

Was Pirated Code Used By HealthCare.gov?

Aargh!

Should copyright even exist when so many lives are at stake?

23 comments:

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I came across that and I dismissed it thinking it could be a false flag.

Ridiculous perhaps, I know, but, when the priorities of the administration breathes, eats and never sleeps the political angle, it takes a toll.

What could the pirated code mean in this complicated farrago of infelicitous farce.

chickelit said...

Even false flags should be called out, Lem.

I changed the tenor of the linked story's headline by changing it to interrogatory mood.

chickelit said...

...farrago of infelicitous farce

Nice

Methadras said...

This is to high level for anyone to care on the street. They just wanna know when they are gonna get their free drugs, rent paid, blah blah blah.

Icepick said...

Every day things manage to get worse with this website. Iheard somewhere today that allegedly one person in Florida, and only one, has managed to successfully enroll in ObamaCare so far. Out of Florida's 18 or 19 million people, that doesn't sound so good.

Unfortunately I heard that on the radio, so I don't have a link handy, and the story may be false. OTOH, the Administration is purposefully keeping these numbers hidden, so they must be awful.

Shouting Thomas said...

All code is stolen from somewhere.

Only idiots write original code.

Chip Ahoy said...

Well funded and founded and foresworn with great fanfare the formula fell forward fumbled and flailed to flapping fandango foiled and fallen fractured to fractals and finally familiar folderol of full-blown fail. Other than that I have hope for millions, or thousands, or hundreds, or tens, to finally have healthcare so they don't die on the streets of starvation and anguish and pain, unloved and discarded by a society unable to care.

I was talking to a lady and she mentioned a corner nearby where bums usually are. Sketchy. That is her word. This was after me complaining a lot. Most out of character out in public like that so I kind of wanted to make up for being so cross. I said,

"I would like to tell them this whole city is set up to help. If they can just go along with the program, they have available a good deal of immediate help."

And she beamed. She appeared very happy to hear that. She really liked having that idea about her city.

Incidentally, She mentioned a nearby corner within sight. The next day I was veritably accosted by a bum curled up in the bushes there. He could have been anybody's grandpa. It was a laying down accosting so not dangerous at all save for the alarm of a grown man, an old man, suddenly appearing in the wrong place. Right there on the busiest street in town. In a large brick planter elevated 4 feet off the ground. I did my errand, returned with cash to give him but by then he was sleeping. Unrelated to anything, right after that I read British gamers talking about "hedge wizards." In the gaming world not much power and they don't know many spells. And then the next day all the hedges in the planter are gone. Completely gone, not just thinned out. Like the Crystalline Entity mowed over the whole place. No more hedge wizards.

YoungHegelian said...

"Pirated" Code:

"Arrrrr, me maties, get yer scurvy bottoms up to the fock'sil & overload those operators!

Scamper up the main mast & normalize that database, or there'll be nary a drop of grog for the lot of ye!

And if I don't see that code fully optimized for 64 bit by the morrow, I'll flay the very skin off yer bones!"

rhhardin said...

Software copyright is a mistake in the first place.

Keep it as a trade secret or just publish it as a gift, depending on your inclination.

It ought to be like trying to copyright a theorem.

rhhardin said...

Here's some free code, for example.

Icepick said...

YH, you forgot to mention keel hauling.

And now it turns out the company that got the biggest contract got a no-bid contract, that one of Michelle's classmates is an exec with the company, and that the guy running the company became an Obama donor after his company was awarded the contract.

Amazingly, it keeps getting worse.

YoungHegelian said...

@Icepick,

And now it turns out the company that got the biggest contract got a no-bid contract.....

I don't doubt you, Icepick, but if you had a link for that, it would be terrific.

I'd love to use it as a beating stick for some very special FB friends.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Nice

F for Fake.

Shouting Thomas said...

I've looked at the ACA site.

Front end design is very bad. Hard to understand that.

The real coding issues are pulling in data from databases scattered all over the country.

This process is maddening enough without writing original code. Since the essential data transfer models have already been written on a small scale, I certainly hope that the programmers stole that code and modified it, instead of writing all original code.

The trouble with all original code is that it has to be debugged, and you never know where that will lead until it is exposed to heavy use by the end users.

edutcher said...

If it was pirated, Sibelius should walk the plank and Choom should be marooned, on the same island with Pelosi and Dingy Harry and they can fight over the one pistol between them.

PS I can't speak to HHS, but, if it was the IRS, all their stuff is done in-house, so much of it may well be original code since the T-men have a stake in it.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

If the private sector is forbidden from doing what ObamaCare does, why should we be surprised when monopoly failures plague a system conceived, designed and implemented by the biggest monopoly going?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

By monopoly I mean an enterprise completely unconcerned by the possibility of failure.

Icepick said...

Crap, I forgot the link. I'm on my phone now and that isn't easy to do hyperlinks. I saw the story on Drudge.

YoungHegelian said...

@Icepick,

I got the link right here.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

"Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website"

I can see Chicago from my window.

JAL said...

from what I remember from reading last week -- or earlier this week, the code was actually open source but required that it be acknowledged / identified when used.

The lines I saw included a coder's quirky comment to himself/herself. The comment was exactly duplicated in the Obamacare ACA healthcare.gov software -- without the requisite acknowledgement.

Words fail.

JAL said...

@ ST Front end design is very bad. Hard to understand that.

Shoot, the directions for creating a username were totally contradictory to what had to be done.

and / or ???

That's all I looked at.

deborah said...

Hang a shining star upon the highest bough :)