Things couldn't be worse for Uber these days. Sexual harassment scandal, Didi Chuxing plans for global expansion, now this lawsuit.
Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
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Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#22From another source to provide some colour: > According to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in California, Waymo accuses Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Google to found Otto and now serves as a top ranking Uber executive, stole 14,000 highly confidential documents from Google before departing to start his own company. Among the documents were schematics of a circuit board and details about radar and L…
It's kind amazing that Google keeps reiterating how their incredible security protects your data, and that even employees are extremely carefully monitored. Yet their confidential trade secrets were taken by a dude who seemingly didn't have access to them as part of his job (since he had to go install the software) and a portable hard drive. The post also says he talked about replicating their technology at a competi…
There's a huge difference between security of user data and security of company secrets. Having access to the latter is not unreasonable; access to the former should be heavily restricted and closely monitored.
Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#23From another source to provide some colour: > According to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in California, Waymo accuses Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Google to found Otto and now serves as a top ranking Uber executive, stole 14,000 highly confidential documents from Google before departing to start his own company. Among the documents were schematics of a circuit board and details about radar and L…
It's kind amazing that Google keeps reiterating how their incredible security protects your data, and that even employees are extremely carefully monitored. Yet their confidential trade secrets were taken by a dude who seemingly didn't have access to them as part of his job (since he had to go install the software) and a portable hard drive. The post also says he talked about replicating their technology at a competi…
There's a number of tradeoffs to be made between internal secrecy/silos and trust/openness in any company, and google tends to lean heavily towards trusting their employees when it comes to corp data + resources, designs, strategy etc.
User data is an entirely different matter, and is appropriately treated as such.
Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea that's incredibly bad if that's what that guy did.. in general for EE designs, the schematic/layouts are not that hard to deduce how you would do it if you are in contact with the company that makes the LIDAR device (the unique and difficult part -- basically just need to ask them, like "yo, how roughly should I interface with this thing and whats your recommendation on a number of the components.. and can you gi…
There however could be custom-ordered parts on the BOM, documentation of which might be under NDA.
Yes good point. That would be super obvious that they stole it then.. "yea, could I order the BA33525 part that you custom built for somebody else.. yea I know its undocumented, but I know you have it somehow...."
Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#25Maybe I have a selective memory as a former Zynga employee, but generally these "stolen documents" lawsuits in high profile tech companies have generally turned out to be pretty factual. Easy to prove, and hard to fake.
And lawsuits like this generally don't get filed unless it's near slam-dunk considering the burden of proof is high on stolen electronic documents.
Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#26Minor fix: Waymo is suing for stealing secrets, not patents. As far as I know, it's not actually possible to steal a patent.
Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#27> searched for and installed specialized software onto his company-issued laptop That could mean he downloaded an SFTP client like Cyberduck. He could have searched the internet for a client and then installed it. It doesn't say he did not have auth. Imagine a Google security engineer being deposed for this lawsuit. Lawyer: "Show me on the MacBook how he downloaded the files" Engineer: "Well, he used Cyberduck" Lawye…
This is true, but it doesn't negate the issue. If you need some sort of client to gain access to the design server, and he didn't already have it, it very likely means that he didn't work on those files normally, and hence, really probably shouldn't have had access to them.
He may not have installed "hacking tools" or anything like that, but he did specifically take action to access files he didn't normally use as part of his job. Which is, I think, all that this post is claiming.
Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#28From another source to provide some colour: > According to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in California, Waymo accuses Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Google to found Otto and now serves as a top ranking Uber executive, stole 14,000 highly confidential documents from Google before departing to start his own company. Among the documents were schematics of a circuit board and details about radar and L…
On the other hand, we know that public statements about lawsuits are always a pack of lies as everyone tries to look as wronged as possible: remember YC's bluster about the Cruise co-founder lawsuit, right before they had to settle for dozens/hundreds of millions? or remember the Oculus lawsuit where they alleged almost the exact same thing (Carmack stealing thousands of sooper-sekrit VR documents/files) and wound up only winning on some non-compete stuff and getting only a fixed award which was a fraction of what they thought they'd get?
Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#29I always was incredibly surprised at how quickly Uber had working self-driving cars (with the required, highly specialized hardware). Guess this explains it.
Uber acquired Otto around 08/2016. I don't think this explains it.
Who knows maybe they had somebody else from the Google self driving car project to steal self-driving car secrets earlier. Based on what this Levandowski guy did the industrial espionage may go unnoticed. I'm wondering if Waymo will require Uber to reveal schematics of their self-driving car project as part of the law suite.
Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets
#30How can you steal patents? Those are public info. Infringing on patents?
"Patent application nonpublication request"