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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

#351

Post by ma2rten »

webXL wrote: post #335
ma2rten wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also be that Levandowski met with Uber execs as the lawsuit claims, but didn't tell them he had stolen the documents.

That could very well be true. wink wink "I know it's hard to believe, Travis, but while I worked for a company doing the exact the same thing as this company, at nights, I singlehandedly created this trove of patentable technology that will revolutionize the automobile industry, which coincidently , really , my former employer is spending billions to do. You have to trust me."

If I had stolen a bunch of trade secrets I wouldn't tell my company's competitor.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jul/07/marketingandpr...

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

#353

Post by ytpete »

non_sequitur wrote: post #310
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

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.

I wouldn't assume so: a larger company can afford to sink a lot more money into litigation, so they could effectively bleed the small company dry defending even a frivolous lawsuit.

Patent trolls are one example of this - where they may deliberately select weaker defendants (instead of going after the bigco "infringers") so ensure they hold the upper hand in the financial power imbalance.

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

#354

Post by klodolph »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #345
klodolph wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are continuing to let your experience with a single, hostile work environment cloud your openness to something that... isn't even controversial. I'm flattered that you want to talk about me, but really, I'm not the subject of the discussion here, and it's inappropriate to talk about what's going through my head or to try and psychoanalyze me. > These are not high cost processes, these are basic, common sense pr…

So, the head of my department doesn't have access to... most of what I do. That isn't to say she isn't in charge, or doesn't have every right to see that information. But it isn't her job, and she doesn't need that access, so she doesn't have it. If she needed it, she'd get it. There's no trust issue here, she is completely trustworthy. But her not having the access protects her just as much as it protects the rest o…

Where I work, I can make changes to what I'm working on that break things far away, from time to time. In well designed systems this doesn't happen too often, but you might be surprised sometimes how a seemingly insignificant change can make a system fail somewhere else because someone made an assumption that is no longer true.

So I can make a change, see that it breaks some test somewhere else (failed CI test), and peer into the diffs on the opposite side of the code base to decide what to do about that. It's proven quite useful, from time to time. I've seen weird problems like hitting pessimal access patterns for software developed halfway around the world.

> Anthony clearly didn't work on it's contents, because he didn't already have the software to access that server on his computer.

That doesn't follow. I work on a source code repository every day, but I'd need special software to exfiltrate a copy. Same with the various design documents and things I work with—all stored in a private cloud. If I wanted to exfiltrate it I'd get a script to do it automatically.

Remember, this wasn't just the guy who started the autonomous driver project. He wasn't just the "department head". He's an industrial engineer who founded a Lidar startup. The idea that he should be denied access to Lidar design documents is patently absurd.

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

#355

Post by bitL »

delroth wrote: post #134
morecoffee wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google employees are probably aware they are being tracked. Keeping such a thing a secret would likely result in more leaks, not fewer.

Not only is it very well known internally, Google has even open sourced some of the tools that are used for that purpose: https://github.com/google/grr

Still, how can they work in a basically zero trust environment? They can't hope anyone reasonable will come up with some great idea and willingly share it with them.

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

#356

Post by angry_octet »

wodenokoto wrote: post #281
rajathagasthya wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They could easily bypass Macbook security with a USB device Isn't this only possible if the laptop is unlocked?

If the machine doesn't have full harddrive encryption, you can just boot from USB/CD/Firewire and have access to everything.

FDE has been the default for ages.

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

#357

Post by eternalban »

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…

> [...] Mr. Levandowski searched for [...]

Did he actually "search" on "his company-issued laptop" using company network or did he google it from his own machines at home?

Anthony is likely a very smart person, so if allegations are true, I would think the latter is more likely.

How does Alphabet know what he searched for? /G

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

#358

Post by AlexC04 »

gwern wrote: post #28
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…

On the other hand, we know that public statements about lawsuits are always a pack of lies as everyone tries to look as wronged as possible: remember YC's bluster about the Cruise co-founder lawsuit, right before they had to settle for dozens/hundreds of millions? or remember the Oculus lawsuit where they alleged almost the exact same thing (Carmack stealing thousands of sooper-sekrit VR documents/files) and wound up…

The oculus settlement I remember was for half a billion http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14474198/oculus-lawsuit-verd...

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

#359

Post by curun1r »

non_sequitur wrote: post #310
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

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.

In this case, I believe the threat was twofold. They'd drag out proceedings so that we couldn't have afforded to make it to a judgment. But they'd also threaten to cancel a deal with one of our other large customers if they didn't cancel with us. Knowing basically our customer list and how much those customers paid for the software, it wasn't much work to infer the company's somewhat tenuous financial situation. They guessed, correctly, that we'd drop it rather than risk the company's future on a successful lawsuit that, win or lose, would likely mean the loss of a significant customer.

There was nothing we'd done as a company that was actionable.

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

#360

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #251
GooglyMoogly wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your company stores very private info on billions of people, and is actively attacked (sometimes successfully) by the top intelligence agencies of the world[1][2], you have to be extremely careful, and monitor everything. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora [2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech-companies-s...

Some people might see an irony in your comment. Economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in 2009 "...banks that are too big to fail are too big to exist..." My theory is that the too big to exist theory is now true for basically all the tech giants. Generally, everyone who knows the kind of tracking these companies do (internal and external) agree this is true, except those who benefit from the companies' continued existence…

You conveniently forgot consumers.
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