Expedia IT bod gets all-expenses-paid trip to prison after hacking execs' emails for profit

The stock market is a giant money laundering scam setup to help idiots pretend they are participating in a useful business method, when in reality they are marks for a crap shoot where only the big players and the house win. Sound familiar? Have you ever been invited to an IPO? Let me guess, no. Do you think you will ever be invited to one without you already having tons of money and a collection of influential white business guys helping you put your puny foot in the door? And you want to call insider trading a crime? There are entire companies who do this exact same thing, insider trading, but they get away with it by calling it something else. They call it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_network#Investor_Expert_Networks_2

(#Investor_Expert_Networks_2 is the page link, if it cuts off above)

Same thing, but since they are a corporation, they can get away with it through the threat of defending tribes of in-house lawyer-sharks. Don't let all the words fool you, these are organizations who infiltrate companies of interest, to "make network connections" to get at the source of the trading info. They pay you to rat out the inside info on the company where you work, for the sole purpose of making trades based on this insider information. It's the same thing that our "bad man" did in the article here, only he didn't go about it as another corporate entity.

Sorry, if you are an anti-wikipedia prude. I find the wiki highly useful for everyday knowledge in a wide variety of subjects where bias is not a factor. Tech info is great. I find info that is biased is usually not very good info to begin with. Take politics, please. The things that happen in the political world are non-scientific, garbage, nonsense issues. Taking it to mean more than it is, shit, is a frivolous effort, at best. And at the same time the wiki tries ever-too-hard to police itself when it really gets in the way of enjoying an article. Such as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Clifton

Look at all the stupid warnings about lack of verification on a topic about a cutting-edge comic fucking with anyone and everyone, for a joke. It's overkill. We get it, there are some questionable items and things not fully explained... I'm not writing a book on Tony, I'm just refreshing my memory. Holy crap.

That detail puzzles me. How did the senior IT exec have access to users' plaintext passwords in the first place? (Or were these mail admin accounts?)

Re: Expedia

" the prices on travel sites seem to be the same nowadays... "

I guess Adam Smith would point to the invisible hand of the market, mind you even he was wary of the Joint Stock companies of his day:

- "being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance ...[as] their own"

Re: "as the son of poor immigrants"

I think it's referring to the origin of the guy's predisposition to having (lots of) money, rather than blaming the crime on the fact that his parents were a). poor and/or b). immigrants. Sigh.

Re: "as the son of poor immigrants"

It's relevant in the context that the defendant was attempting to use it as a diminishing factor. It was a quote from the defendant, not being used as a slur.