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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

#211

Post by klodolph »

aidos wrote: post #61
tajen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Google build such forsenics? Do they have spyware monitoring all their company laptops?

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…

Company-issued laptop probably tracks what software is installed anyway to mitigate malware. Services are probably designed not to accept connections from untrusted devices. Hardware 2FA makes it difficult to impersonate someone without their knowledge.

I can see the temptation—I've always missed having access to IP after leaving a company.

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

#212

Post by justin »

danjoc wrote: post #154
untilHellbanned wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's untrue. Otto was not a YC company.

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

#213

Post by justin »

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

This not true. Why would you spread this lie?

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

#215

Post by klodolph »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6
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…

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…

I'd like to add to what other people are saying here. I've worked at a company where people were given, basically, the minimum level of trust. All the horizontal projects were dead, teams competed with each other for the same clients, and we chose meeting rooms to avoid being overheard by other teams when we were discussing things.

It sucked. I left.

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

#216

Post by jpeg_hero »

Lots of Juice here.

Complaint: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k...

>Waymo was recently – and apparently inadvertently – copied on an email from one of its LiDAR component vendors.

Is this going to be a legal test of that annoying lawyer email footer language?

>This message contains information from xxxxxx that may be confidential and privileged. If you are not an intended recipient, please refrain from any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of this information and note that such actions are prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately by telephone or by replying to this transmission.

Ha! More legalese BS that never holds up.

> Otto launched publicly in May 2016, and was quickly acquired by Uber in August 2016 for $680 million.

The fact pattern here is going to be absolutely brutal for Uber. A non-technical judge is going to see the allegation: ex-google employee downloads technical documents in December 2015, launches a company 5 months later in May 2016, and is bought for $680M (later speculated to be $1B+) for all its technical accomplishments. How much fundamental research did they do in the 3 months between May-16 and August-16?!?!? Or was it just to buy the stolen IP that google had developed over 7 years?!? Brutal for Uber!

--

A public company recently settled a similar lawsuit (competitor hires exec, exec is proven to have downloaded documents) for $130M on much smaller numbers. And the defendant was run through the legal wringer first.

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/zillow-realtor-com-operator-mov...

Expect Uber spankage, bigly.

> shortly after Mr. Levandowski received his final multi-million dollar payment from Google

Funny because of all the recent press that Google paid autonomous driving talent too much that they left!

>Infringement of Patent No. 9,368,936 (Against All Defendants)

Real nasty. If a trade secrets lawsuit is an arrow, throwing in a patent infringement claim too, is poison tipped and barbed!

This is some good "old skool Google" where they used to show broad competence across many domains; in this case legal.

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

#217

Post by maverick_iceman »

w00tw00tw00t wrote: post #121
andreyf wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not possible unless you have zero-days against the USB drivers or firmware on your laptop, in which case being logged in or not doesn't really matter.

Proof I'm paranoid. My greater point, however, is that they have done some really shady stuff, and stealing competitor's IP is part of their culture, so their behavior itself promotes and justifies paranoia on my part and on the part of anyone looking to work for or do business with Uber. Reputation is everything.

It's pretty stupid to get paranoid over this. As GP pointed out if you logged out then it's very unlikely that they will get access.

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

#218

Post by Buge »

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.

>which makes the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret a federal crime.

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

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

#219

Post by tptacek »

DannyBee wrote: post #196
tptacek wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's evidence, but it's not dispositive, especially in cases like Cruise, where the technicality that determines the outcome might give the defense a 60/40 edge after a court case that will itself cost many millions of dollars.

What he said. Particularly in patent and other IP cases, it's often cheaper to settle, even for a lot, than defend the lawsuit. You could say our system has failed utterly You wouldn't be wrong in that case. ....

I've never been in a situation anything like Cruise, but I've been a founder in an acquisition that went to legal over absent cofounders --- actually, come to think of it, twice, once with me the absent cofounder and once not --- and: I can't imagine any of these cases ever not settling.

Even with no tenable claim at all, the absent cofounder has a gun to your head: a proposed liquidation that pends on a civil suit simply isn't going to close. There are time limits on all of this stuff, and the acquirer is simply going to say "fuck it" and walk if they can't predict when the deal will close. A detail I think people who've never sold a company don't realize is that the legal costs for both sides of a deal that closes uneventfully can get close to 7 figures.

I guess this is valuable information for startup founders. It's also a reason you should run, not walk, from any early-stage business partner that wants to negotiate or complexify vesting. 1 year cliff, 4+ year vest, the way everyone does it, or go start a different company.

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

#220

Post by w00tw00tw00t »

dmix wrote: post #199
w00tw00tw00t wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, how do you do that?

Well, logs are quite easily accessible on any OS. Memory forensics would have 100% given you evidence that it was accessed and exactly what was done. There are plenty of guides on how to forensically dump memory but that depends on the OS. But I'm also in this is FUD camp. I highly doubt any company would do such a risky thing such as mirror your machine data merely for an interview. This would be highly illegal and…

I think you might be right, but I had reason to worry given Uber's history with competitors, esp. industrial espionage. They were actively competing with the company I worked for at the time. The laptop was my own, but I have no reason to assume that they knew that. I did have some material of my own that I considered to be valuable to their business so I was concerned primarily about that (I had done things that have pushed the envelop quite a bit in a very specialized area that they were just getting into) All of those factors made me paranoid. If Uber was a good corporate citizen with no history of actively and illegally spying on competitors, I would not have been so freaked out after that episode. Call me paranoid... what's new.
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