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The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

191–200 of 542 posts

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#191

How credible are all these logs? Email records (came up in Oracle Android case) are one thing, emails are a known thing. But how trustworthy are Google Drive logs, a record that only exists within Google, when what they've recorded helps their case? I'm not casting aspersions, just curious how a new kind of evidence plays out.

By what process do you think Waymo (or is it Alphabet) would fabricate these logs? Like, who in particular would do it? Would they form a team of a dozen, two dozen people to do all the fabrication across all the systems that would be impacted, without leaving any fingerprints? And of course none of this planning could be done over email or Google docs, so it all has to be coordinated in person with only handwritten…

Yeah, I thought I made it clear I didn't think there would be any fabrication. That's different from it being able to completely rely on something being accurate, I doubt it's recorded with the same care financial data is, for instance.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bombshell part specifically would be Levandowski arranging with Uber to steal Waymo tech, form Otto, and Uber would acquire Otto. In all of the reporting I read about this after the first filing, this was missed.

With everything that has gone on at Uber including a former friend of Travis' accusing him of stealing the company concept itself, something like this wouldn't be a Surprise.

Although I am ready to believe almost anything derogatory about Kalanick up to and including eating bbq'd babies with mayonnaise (yuck), the idea of "stealing a company concept" is pretty lame.

Lyft started with a different business snd pivoted to Uber's (itself all a pivot?). Did Lyft "steal the concept?"

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another comment from an HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12558078 "Otto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret."

What is the illegal part of this? This happens all the time in the Valley. Did they actually steal source code?

That certainly seems to be the implication of the original article.

I guess it's up to the legal process to decide if he did or not.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearing up some serious misconceptions here: 1) Austin did not ban Uber or Lyft. The city council passed an ordinance that required a gradually increasing percentage of rideshare drivers pass an FBI-approved fingerprint background check. (These rules are in place in other locales in which Uber operates, such as NYC and Houston.) Uber and Lyft formed a PAC that got a proposition on the next local election ballot that…

Are you sure it was to make an example or there was something unique / different about Austin that made both companies not want to provide business there?

It's my impression that they thought of Austin as an "innovation friendly" place and they were "offended" that Austin tried to regulate them.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#196

Outside of the case, the most striking thing to me about this is the level of detail that Google has over the logs and actions of their laptop. They were able to tell that a memory card was plugged in for 8 hours a year ago? I have trouble finding exactly how a customer encountered a 500 10 minutes ago.

How many thousands of hours of video is uploaded to youtube _daily_ and stored on google servers forever? And you are talking about logging actions of your own employees. Let's say 100kb per day per employee (these logs are pretty detailed). 100kb * 50 000 employees = 4.7Gb per day. 1740Gb per year. Probably much, much less then 1 day of youtube videos.

It's obviously not the volume of data that is surprising. It's that they retained system message logs from a random laptop for years. They must regard this as potentially important business information. Does your company do this? Mine sure doesn't.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearing up some serious misconceptions here: 1) Austin did not ban Uber or Lyft. The city council passed an ordinance that required a gradually increasing percentage of rideshare drivers pass an FBI-approved fingerprint background check. (These rules are in place in other locales in which Uber operates, such as NYC and Houston.) Uber and Lyft formed a PAC that got a proposition on the next local election ballot that…

Interesting that Uber and Lyft work together on political influence campaigns like this, given Uber's strategy of bleeding out Lyft through their VC subsidized capital advantage. I would think that just letting them both get shut out of a given city would be a win for Uber.

They weren't "shut out" they were subjected to a popularly-enacted municipal ordinance requiring Austin-administered finger-printing of drivers and decided to stop providing service to Austin.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another comment from an HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12558078 "Otto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret."

What is the illegal part of this? This happens all the time in the Valley. Did they actually steal source code?

They did- lidar and other designs, and this is saying that rather than it only being Levandowski's fault, Kalanick knew what was happening from the beginning and Uber was essentially using Otto as a shell company. This is stated clearly in the third paragraph of the article.

>the subtext of Alphabet’s filing is an even bigger bombshell. Reading between the lines, (in my opinion) Alphabet is implying that Mr Levandowski arranged with Uber to:

>Steal LiDAR and other self-driving component designs from Waymo

>Start Otto as a plausible corporate vehicle for developing the self-driving technology

>Acquire Otto for $680 million

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#199
post #66

How credible are all these logs? Email records (came up in Oracle Android case) are one thing, emails are a known thing. But how trustworthy are Google Drive logs, a record that only exists within Google, when what they've recorded helps their case? I'm not casting aspersions, just curious how a new kind of evidence plays out.

Let's not pretend that you can't fabricate emails too. I strongly suspect that the existence and timestamps of the Drive logs can be verified at multiple levels and exist in backups made around that time. HTTP logs as well as MTA logs have been provided as evidence before, those too could be fabricated.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply fabrication: just there are going to be hiccups and weird inconsistencies in any data source, and it's not one where the hiccups have been seen before in a legal context. You have multiple levels, some slightly disagree, which is correct?

Email you have a bunch of different parties: the sender, the receiver, the servers in the middle, all of which are going to record something, and maybe they differ in weird ways, but if you got it you go it.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#200
post #58

For all the noise and excitement at the start of these clashes, don't they usually get settled with a licensing agreement that both sides can live with? Sometimes we also see a medium-sized payment (not ruinous) to address the allegedly bad conduct. That usually gets paired with some lawyer-like phrases that amount to a blend of quasi-apology and face-saving evasions. It's still an interesting suit. But after Apple/S…

Why would Uber be awarded licensing terms they could "live with" for code they (allegedly) outright stole from a competitor?

Because once the dust settles it amounts to a lucrative sale by Google.

They both have to decide if that might be better than a long and expensive legal battle.

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