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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

#231

Post by ebf6 »

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…

> I could be paranoid. They could have simply moved things on the desk. But anyway, people who are paranoid like me are advised not to take their laptops into Uber interviews. They are capable of just about anything, or so thinks my now paranoid self.

I would be cautious about discrediting intuition as paranoia.

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

#232

Post by Animats »

lindowe wrote: post #46
the_watcher wrote: post #26

Minor fix: Waymo is suing for stealing secrets, not patents. As far as I know, it's not actually possible to steal a patent.

Infringement of patents (the ’273 patent, entitled “Microrod Compression of Laser Beam in Combination with Transmit Lens")

That's not a very interesting patent. It's basically some optical stuff to do LIDAR scanning with non-square pixels, presumably because you want more resolution in one axis than the other. That's nice, but not a big improvement over existing technology.

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

#233

Post by nradov »

itchyouch wrote: post #204
mevile wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems criminal. I remember an engineer from goldman sachs went to prison for doing something similar.

Based on the story from Flash Boys, that Goldman engineer was taking something like a couple of megs worth of his own work that was related to various open source projects. But he became the poster boy for stealing trade secrets and an example to be made of. His mistake was that he used the company internet connection to upload said source files to something like his personal github or dropbox of the sort, so there w…

Companies that care about data security typically disable write access on USB ports.

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

#234

Post by home_boi »

Despite the damning alleged evidence, I get the feeling that all the offenders knew that they would be found out ahead of time, evaluated the risk reward trade-off and decided that they could somehow get away with it.

Are there any lawyers here who could make an educated guess how they could?

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

#235

Post by rtkwe »

itchyouch wrote: post #204
mevile wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems criminal. I remember an engineer from goldman sachs went to prison for doing something similar.

Based on the story from Flash Boys, that Goldman engineer was taking something like a couple of megs worth of his own work that was related to various open source projects. But he became the poster boy for stealing trade secrets and an example to be made of. His mistake was that he used the company internet connection to upload said source files to something like his personal github or dropbox of the sort, so there w…

Banks and similar financial companies are extremely paranoid about data security. Working at one all USB drives were mounter read only unless they were specifically provided by the company and encrypted using provided software. Anywhere you could upload files was blocked as well.

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

#236

Post by curun1r »

danielweber wrote: post #166
xt00 wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

Many many years ago, I was at a software company, and a competitor popped up making very similar software. They made a presentation of their software at a conference, and had a slide showing a screenshot. Our typos were clearly visible. Fun times, fun times. We got a few people fired, but that was about it.

I used to work at a small company that made a SaaS product for a niche HR function. One of our largest customers, a bank whose ATMs you likely see every day if you're in the US, decided to drop our service in favor of a solution built in-house. We were disappointed, but had to let them go.

Then, about 2 years after they'd canceled, our support department got a strange email from a user that was having problems. At first, the support rep didn't understand the issue and asked the user for screenshots of the problem. Sure enough, the screen shots looked exactly like our old product, which had been decommissioned over a year prior. It even had our support email address and phone number on it. It turns out the version of the software they developed in-house started by scraping our site, renaming all the .html files to .aspx and then making the dynamic parts be data driven.

When we called them on it, they basically threatened to use lawyers to put us out of business if we pursued the issue, so I guess our management decided to drop it. We did make them change the support email and phone number.

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

#237

Post by asadlionpk »

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

Cruise is the one you are looking for.

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

#238

Post by valleyer »

Kostchei wrote: post #76
icelancer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering even with logging off: journaling file systems, "user assist", device connection logs, pre-fetch (or your OS's equivalent)- these are all huge tranches of data if you are looking at a system shortly after an event. Ask me 6 months later- probably not. Give me a system that hasn't even rebooted, has a heap of ram and hasn't been used much since- 6 weeks is fine, not ideal, but doable.

Journaling filesystems don't "journal" all the activity in perpetuity. They typically just journal the changes until they're committed to disk, usually for less than a second.

See http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf, section 7.2 "How Does Journaling Work?".

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

#239

Post by ocdtrekkie »

klodolph wrote: post #215
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is entirely not related to what we're talking about here. It's not about trust, it's about good practice. If someone needs access to something, they request it, you grant it. Simple. But there should be common sense controls on data access, for everyone's benefit.

You're talking about a hostile work environment. I'm talking about a secure one.

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

#240

Post by x0x0 »

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…

I would imagine there are IDS systems running, given Google's state level adversaries.

Accessing large amounts of files you haven't previously accessed and shortly thereafter attaching an external drive should trip a competent IDS.

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