321–330 of 364 posts
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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).
Yes, of course it can be broken, it only takes 2^256 attempts in order to do so.
If there's anyway to short Uber or any of the other unicorns kept afloat by low interest venture capital, please let me know.
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?
Can they really claim that the supplier damaged them by leaking trade secrets if the trade secrets aren't theirs?
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> 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.
As Cardinal Richelieu said[1] about 400 years ago: Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him
1. the attribution of this quote is disputed
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…
In general, when I develop, I virtually have all of Google's code base 'checked out' and can edit any of millions of files in my snapshot of the world. I don't need to check out multiple silo'ed repositories or beg for access, diving into any code in the universe has almost zero transactional overhead, it's all mapped into one giant filesystem. (https://plus.google.com/+MattUebel/posts/4dQBDF5CmdX)
On the other hand, production systems are heavily walled off from the corporate network. For all intents and purposes, the corp network your desktop is plugged into is "untrusted"
Nice try though.
What kind of employee would download 14K files to a personal drive right before quitting? It is trivially easy to watch what files get copied over to external drives. I think you can follow the money trail here and find some answers for sure. Now if Uber/Otto has a clause that prohibits employees from bringing in confidential data from previous companies, how can they be held liable? Does Google have to prove that th…
A supplier of Google received the file from Uber and that supplier forwarded it to Google. This means the file was sent out by Uber to a supplier to try to get parts made. I think that's proof enough. Btw that's 1 very sharp eyed engineer, whoever that is...
It sounds like this was entirely accidental on the supplier's part.
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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…
Googlers all have to use 2-factor access via hardware tokens, so you'll need to steal their laptop and steal their token, and murder the employee before they report it to security.
Google laptops only permit the installation of software from Google, they are locked down and don't allow arbitrary installation of software, much like an iPhone. Those using Chromebooks are even safer.
Having to ask permission for every thing not only adds huge overhead, it inhibits global code gardening and technical debt reduction, and it inhibits learning, because you don't even know if you need to ask permission for something until you see it. You don't know what you don't know. If I want to learn about Google Translate because it might benefit my project, asking permission is bureaucracy, because I don't even know if what they have will help until I see it, and if I had to write a long justification for access rights, I probably either don't have a clue why I really need it, or might just not bother because of the hassle and seek out other open resources.
I feel sorry for you if you work for a company that operates internally like North Korea. One of the rewarding things about working at Google is the constant learning experience of exploring other people's stuff.
Google might have been better off with patents than trade secrets. There are financial penalties for theft of trade secrets, but once the secret is out, no injunctions. The one who stole it can use it. With patents, injunctions are available, although hard to get. Anyway, several companies are developing automotive LIDAR units which are better than Google's rotating things. Quantergy and Velodyne claim to be close to…
I doubt there is any hot technology in some LIDAR interface board in the first place.
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That's more than just an oversimplification. Security is inherently hostile, I don't see any other way of putting things. We tolerate a certain amount of hostility in order to reap the benefits that security gives us, and we tolerate a certain amount of vulnerability in order to reap the benefits that laxness gives us. > If someone needs access to something, they request it, you grant it. Simple. The saying goes that…
The problem is, it doesn't seem like prevention or detection was working here at all. Even though they clearly collected enough data to reconstruct what happened, they both failed to prevent this, by not having even common sense security protections, nor did they detect it when it occurred, only finding out because a supplier ratted out another client. These are not high cost processes, these are basic, common sense…
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.
What's absolutely hilarious is that a lot of the self-driving tech was originally funded by US, the American Citizens and google simply used it and worked on it further. Maybe every American should get shares in Waymo!