Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 364 posts

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

#301

Post by ocdtrekkie »

mariusmg wrote: post #297
unityByFreedom wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is why we can't have nice things. Darned lawyers. Can't live with them, can't live without them

>can't live without them Really?

Without lawyers, Google would need to actually secure their data, rather than counting on lawyers to clean up the mess they made here.

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

#302

Post by wavefunction »

xapata wrote: post #157
wavefunction wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well then I guess there exists a difference in ethics. Theft involves deprivation of the specific thing taken. So deleting the original data after copying it might consist of theft.

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

#303

Post by billhathaway »

kuschku wrote: post #280
Jabbles wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't dismiss something from your armchair. I've just mentioned that Google relies on this technology to secure their network.

The problem is that it’s basically a fancy version of using MAC addresses for auth. I’m more surprised a Google engineer couldn’t circumvent it.

If you read the "Beyond Corp" doc, there are also certificates involved.

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

#304

Post by Fricken »

xt00 wrote: post #9
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…

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…

Levandowski does have some specialized technical knowledge of Lidar, he started up 510 systems, a company focused on making Lidar for robots, which was quietly bought up by Google in 2011.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/th...

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

#306

Post by taneq »

Jabbles wrote: post #83
taneq wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this "over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems" is what, an engineering repo? (Edit: My money's on repo. It says 'searched for and installed specialized software', I'm translating that as 'installed git.') Or did he just take a copy of his mailbox? Sounds like a rookie move to be downloading this stuff on his work laptop either way.

Stealing is a rookie move. But I don't think there was a choice about using his work laptop. You can't connect an arbitrary device to Google's network. https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html

If I were to put my evil hat on, I'd arrange for an innocent and not-very-well acquainted coworker to have their laptop outside away from cameras while I used it to siphon data off onto a USB drive.

But I wouldn't, because I'm not evil.

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

#307

Post by kazagistar »

csallen wrote: post #119
wavefunction wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly! Btw, the specific term of art for "actual things" that are subject to theft is "rivalrous" (adj): a good whose consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers. You can commit theft of a rivalrous good, like an apple or a computer. You cannot, however, do the same to a file or a song or an idea. I wish more people understood this difference. Society would be better for it.

I'm not sure how society would benefit from a better understanding of a technical difference between these two crimes.

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

#308

Post by hluska »

dba7dba wrote: post #135
hluska wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite... First, Levandowski is far from a junior engineer. He's been described as the tech lead at Waymo and worked on Google Maps and Streetview. Second, he left Waymo to co-found Otto, a startup which existed for six months before Uber acquired it for several hundred million dollars. Third, he's now described as a senior executive at Uber. I'm not sure where Facebook comes from here. Did I miss something??

Yes, yes. One must not comment on HN while coding (simple stuff) and eating snack, and telling kids to do their homework. I work from home today. My apologies...

Don't worry bud and thanks for your reply!! I knew there was a 50% chance that I was severely confused and I appreciate you taking the time to clarify.

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

#309

Post by kuschku »

billhathaway wrote: post #303
kuschku wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it’s basically a fancy version of using MAC addresses for auth. I’m more surprised a Google engineer couldn’t circumvent it.

If you read the "Beyond Corp" doc, there are also certificates involved.

Yes — I've described above that simply extracting them solves that issue. Overall it's fancy assymetric DRM. (And anything like that can be broken).

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

#310

Post by non_sequitur »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #249
curun1r wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

> 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. This is why we can't have nice things. Darned lawyers. Can't live with them, can't live without them

To be fair ...saying you'd use lawyers to put someone out of business makes no sense unless the company had done something that the lawyers could go after. Hating on lawyers for being aimed at a company is like hating the court system for being available. The bigco's lawyers arent doing this of their own motivation. I'm' sure there was other stuff going on that made the op's company back down.
Post reply on HN