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Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

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Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#151

Post by OJFord »

chollida1 wrote: post #4

From 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…

> One of our suppliers ... sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber’s ...

Ouch, this doesn't play well for the supplier either!

Presumably if Uber wins, it'd have a solid case against the supplier. If it loses, or while Waymo v Uber is ongoing, might there be a case anyway?

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#152

Post by sbierwagen »

w00tw00tw00t wrote: post #69

I had an interview there where the manager asked me to leave my laptop behind and go for a walk. I was hesitant after hearing stories of Uber conducting electronic espionage against its competitors. They could easily bypass Macbook security with a USB device (I had heard of that on HN too) so I was very nervous to leave my laptop behind and noted its exact orientation and position on the table. Sure enough when I ret…

Why didn't you just shut it off first? You had FDE turned on, right?

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#153

Post by cmyr »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #85
w00tw00tw00t wrote: post #69

I had an interview there where the manager asked me to leave my laptop behind and go for a walk. I was hesitant after hearing stories of Uber conducting electronic espionage against its competitors. They could easily bypass Macbook security with a USB device (I had heard of that on HN too) so I was very nervous to leave my laptop behind and noted its exact orientation and position on the table. Sure enough when I ret…

Thanks for the info. Will know not leave my laptop behind in any interviews.

A better strategy is just to not interview at uber.

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#154

Post by danjoc »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #141
danjoc wrote: post #35

There's something very wrong in the world when the people who invent things aren't the main beneficiary of their own inventions. Edit: A guy downloads 9.7GB of other people's work, walks off with it, and sells it. Flushing years of work from hundreds of engineers down the toilet. You down voters really support that? Amazing.

Otto was a YC company so there's your answer. People condone a lot of awful if they 1) make money off it; 2) Have some emotional connection to it

I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for risking down votes to bring that to light.

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#155

Post by golfer »

Does anyone else remember this New Yorker profile [1] of Anthony Levandowski and self driving cars? Way back from 2013, when this tech was still novel. Google let Levandowski run the show for this piece -- his name is mentioned 57 times in the article. Goes to show how important and trusted he was in Google's universe.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/25/auto-correct

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#156

Post by Fricken »

Presumably you're in Arizona at the moment, Mr. Levandowski, it's close to the border, run for it!

We'll take a moment to remember the salad days, when you were just a crazy college kid who showed up at the Darpa Grand Challenge with a self driving motorcycle:

https://youtu.be/XOgkNh_IPjU

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#157

Post by xapata »

wavefunction wrote: post #115
xapata wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, copying can be theft.

Copying illicit data constitutes copyright infringement at its best, or industrial espionage at its worst. Theft is a different type of crime involving actual things.

The word "theft" can have different meanings depending on context. Most people think in ethical terms rather than legal.

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#158

Post by jsprogrammer »

mahyarm wrote: post #107
aidos wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they definitely have some really specific accusations about what went on: >>> To gain access to Waymo’s design server, Mr. Levandowski searched for and installed specialized software onto his company-issued laptop. Once inside, he downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation. Then he connected an external drive to the lapt…

My guess is he still had a network connection up when he did the copy. These kind of things like JAMF, osquery and so on upload what you do on your computer on a fairly frequent basis. After a certain company size all of them do something like this, and most of them do not spell out the amount of spying they do on their employee's work devices and office space. Or he didn't do a secure wipe when he reformatted the dr…

Could Google's records be fabricated? If there are separate logging chips, one would get access to all schematics, fabrication facilities, etc. in order to even consider any Google claims based on data collected through such methods.

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#160

Post by danielweber »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #90
polishTar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't need to be about "secrecy", it's about "security". Even when you ignore the employee trust issue, and assume everyone at your company would never betray you, "least privilege" is still not just best practice for security, it's common sense. People should not be able to access data they don't need. If they need it, you can grant it. But the assumption should be that someone who doesn't use the design server…

Their model was "trust the employee, and use the courts to enforce punishment if that trust was misplaced."

We are in phase two of that right now.

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