The most obvious hack of the first type is insider trading, illegal for so long that it’s not even a hack anymore. Generally, insider trading involves buying or selling a security on the basis of nonpublic information. The trader could be a CFO who knows his company’s sales figures before they’re disclosed, the PR person writing the financial report, or the printer who reads that report before it’s published. The harms of insider trading are twofold: (1) it comes at the expense of everyone else who doesn’t have the critical information, and (2) it leads people to mistrust the fairness of the
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