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Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

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Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#51

Post by briandear »

kasey_junk wrote: post #38
tlear wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not know all cultures are same? To Re-education camp with you. Being a TA for undergrad courses this pattern is very common. Other group that consistently gets caught was guys from ME. East Europeans cheat but they almost always put enough effort to make it hard to catch. Thing is that universities do not prosecute this at all. I have seen people graduate who I think never submitted their own assignment at all…

When I TA’d many years ago you could graph the frat brothers by their test/assignment answers.

Did they cheat or did they study together?

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#53

Post by opportune »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #18
sjroot wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and maintain great professional integrity. That said...my experience with Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing. While they made up the majority of our graduate computer science program, most had no respect for academic conduct guidelines. I exp…

It’s funny how afraid people are about tiptoeing around this issue. Cheating among chinese students is widespread and blatant, and they do not even pretend to care. They are completely shameless about it. Everyone with Chinese students knows it, but it’s politically incorrect to call it out. Which they are also aware of, and take advantage of.

In my experience, the ~30% of Chinese students who went to international schools, understood American culture very well, spoke almost perfect English, and who didn't exclusively hang out with other Chinese students never cheated any more than other students. It was the Chinese students who only hung out with other Chinese students who were the major cheaters

However, I only ever TAed for undergraduate courses, where a much larger portion of Chinese students were from the subset with international educations / who were better able to culturally assimilate. And going to a school that was hard to get in to, typically you need to be very impressive to get in as a Chinese international student (or from a powerful family, preferably both) regardless.

At a similarly selective program for graduate school, the Chinese students were, for lack of a better term, more "Chinese" culturally and more insular. I wouldn't be surprised if cheating were worse. But there's also the fact that graduate CS programs are less discerning of international applicants' credentials/pedigree

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#54

Post by themagician »

sjroot wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and maintain great professional integrity. That said...my experience with Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing. While they made up the majority of our graduate computer science program, most had no respect for academic conduct guidelines. I exp…

China is a collectivist society. Their ideas of property rights and intellectual property are fundamentally different. There is “the” answer, not “your” answer.

It seems weird to us but it’s worked well for them. And while our system might seem better, or at the very least “normal” it certainly has its flaws (i.e. patent trolling).

There is probably some middle ground we could come to in the future but the US is completely unwilling to budge from its position. The Chinese simply don’t even understand what that is. How can someone own an idea? Especially one which is just a fundamental truth. Think about that for a second. Think about it as if you were a child. It’s kind of strange. We grow up in the US being taught that we can own just about anything, and to the exclusion of all others, and then we develop systems to promote and protect this. That’s definitely something you can do (as we do) but there is nothing natural about it.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#55

Post by mamborambo »

adventured wrote: post #26
product50 wrote: post #13

Can China not innovate at all? Why are they so keen on stealing IP? Their other homegrown products such as WeChat and Xiaomi seem pretty competitive and very catered to the local market. This is just giving such a bad name to the country and supporting Trump's broad claims that China thrives on IP theft.

They're in a hurry. Culturally today they believe in a sort of global manifest destiny for the near future of their nation. They believe they're destined to be the dominant power. It's dramatically faster and cheaper to steal than to invest decades and countless billions of dollars doing it the hard way. The only way China can fully stand toe to toe with the US in the next two decades or so, is to aggressively plunde…

China (PRC) culture suffers from two systemic weakness: the selfishness created in one-child, post Cultural Revolution, and the cha-bu-duo (nearly good enough) attitude of rapid modernization. In Asia many consumers think of Japan and Korea as being committed to craftmanship and China as being low-cost questionable quality.

Engineers and innovators growing up in such environment are naturally not adverse to cutting corners to reach their goals quickly.

However I have to add that, given the huge population of China, the top 0.1% can still be enormous, and once China learn to discard its shardy attitudes, they can race ahead rapidly.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#56

Post by downrightmike »

sjroot wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and maintain great professional integrity. That said...my experience with Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing. While they made up the majority of our graduate computer science program, most had no respect for academic conduct guidelines. I exp…

The problem with students has been an ongoing problem: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#57

Post by kasey_junk »

briandear wrote: post #51
kasey_junk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I TA’d many years ago you could graph the frat brothers by their test/assignment answers.

Did they cheat or did they study together?

Cheat. Had literal cabinets full of test answers & assignments. Though frankly there were shops near campus that sold such things as well.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#58

Post by yzmtf2008 »

themagician wrote: post #54
sjroot wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and maintain great professional integrity. That said...my experience with Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing. While they made up the majority of our graduate computer science program, most had no respect for academic conduct guidelines. I exp…

China is a collectivist society. Their ideas of property rights and intellectual property are fundamentally different. There is “the” answer, not “your” answer. It seems weird to us but it’s worked well for them. And while our system might seem better, or at the very least “normal” it certainly has its flaws (i.e. patent trolling). There is probably some middle ground we could come to in the future but the US is comp…

I mean I don’t know where you got the idea about property and idea ownership in China, but it certainly wasn’t from the China that I grew up in. Wow.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#59

Post by oceanman888 »

krapp wrote: post #31
product50 wrote: post #13

Can China not innovate at all? Why are they so keen on stealing IP? Their other homegrown products such as WeChat and Xiaomi seem pretty competitive and very catered to the local market. This is just giving such a bad name to the country and supporting Trump's broad claims that China thrives on IP theft.

>Can China not innovate at all? Why are they so keen on stealing IP? They can, but why should they when the world will innovate for them? They have nuclear weapons and most of the world's manufacturing base already, they do it because can get away with it.

Sorry but I don't think that is a well-informed answer, and I am not speaking in favor of china. Speaking as a Chinese who studied aboard early-on here.

1.The government do promote innovation in a violent way and lays-down a lot of infrastructure. Start-up has hence became fashionable to do and they did produce a lot of useful product for domestic consumption which is a different playing field. A lot of time they don't need to go global (china have a bigger mobile game market than the US for instance) and that is part of the reason a lot of the products are not visible to the world.

2. Form my experience with Chinese start-ups they haven't accumulated the design thinking and attention to detail as SV does. They also lack the history of CS as the INTERNET got popular in china in the late 1990s. One exception of such lack of richness is DJI as the founder is dedicated and brought good culture.

So in short the Chinese are trying very hard, government are helping. They have the brain power but lacks richness and system to make real innovation, also sometimes they have no need to go global.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#60

Post by djrogers »

I worked for a company that got acquired by a larger company who happened to have a JV with a Chinese company. A few months after the acquisition, one of us stumbled across a shockingly blatant copy of our product on the Chinese firm’s website. Same box, same ports, same darned WebUI but translated to Chinese.

Now this was a hardware product with a weekly data feed, so not only did someone at the JV feed all the specs and source code to the Chinese company, they sent them weekly updates.

Needless to say, when confronted about this the company didn’t seem too surprised we found out, nor did the understand why everyone was so upset...

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