Shoutbox

You realy do not have the right to do what you want with any information you've found when that information is part of a trade secret or similar act. This has got nothing todo with freedom of speech either. Freedom of speech means the right to express your own opinion without fearing prosecuation or being shut down. It does not mean you have the freedom to publish property of a company or publish trade secrets!

You, as a non-tester, may read the articles and may now now the facts, but you may not spread that information any further either, or you'll risk the same 'punishment' as the inital leaker (where 'punishment' is quite often nothing at all; but that does not make it alright to do).

And that is what I mean with the oh-so-typical internet talk. Because more than often (mostly young) people think they can do whatever they want with the information the moment they find it on the net, source often doesn't even matter. And the fact that almost everybody on the net gets away with it increases this. And more than often they will use arguments like "freedom or speech" or "I'm not under nda, so I can" or whatever.

A newspaper may not publish trade secrets when they find some internal paper on a train, left by some employee of some company. The only thing they may publish is the fact that they found the paper, not what the trade secret paper itself said. If a newspaper would publish the actual contents I can assure you that they will be slapped around a bit with a big lawsuit and will loose.

This is kind of the same as a privacy issue. Except for the difference that with a trade secret and such stuff you're not dealing with a person but instead with a thing/idea/object/etc.