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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."
In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.
He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.
By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)
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Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do
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And tomorrow will be like today, only more so.
-- Isaiah 56:12, New Standard Version
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:34PM
True, it is people and not guns that kill. Yet, do you feel remorse for loading and servicing all the guns and giving them to the psychopath just before he goes on a murdering spree?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jmorris on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:48PM
giving them to the psychopath just before he goes on a murdering spree?
Depends. Plenty of gun shops have refused to sell to a nutjob because they set off their spidey sense but others don't instantly set off those sort of warnings. Guns are a dangerous tool, but so are a lot of things in the wrong hands. The goal should be to get the nutjobs out of our society and either get them the right treatment or lock them up, not to attempt to entirely nerf our whole civilization since that isn't possible. I would prefer to live in a high trust society instead of a police state. I'm funny that way.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday November 22 2016, @09:08PM
You're not answering the question.
There's a difference between a "spidey sense" of a nutjob buying a COTS legal tool, and a dedicated design tailored to the nutjob's dangerous specifications.
> I would prefer to live in a high trust society instead of a police state.
When is your flight?