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

Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 242 posts

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#61

Post by MertsA »

takinola wrote: post #13
pritambaral wrote: post #6

TFA makes it sound as if the entirety of the blame can be placed on one employee. Sure, his actions do seem to support that view, but then again, Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming w…

I don't have direct knowledge of this company or the parties involved but I would be highly doubtful that Nvidia would want to have an employee steal the secrets of a competitor/partner. In my experience, companies of this size would aggressively not want tainted IP inside their companies. He would need to be bringing across something as valuable as AGI, cure for cancer, etc for it to be even worth considering. There…

Would Nvidia the company want to engage in this? No. Would some middle manager involved in poaching this guy from the competitor want to do it? I have my suspicions. It takes two to tango and Nvidia didn't catch this themselves which raises some red flags. How was he hired? What kind of compensation was he able to negotiate? Was it well above the compensation Nvidia would ordinarily pay for an engineer of his level? How did he introduce the code into Nvidia's version control? Were there obvious red flags about the "development" pace that should have raised eyebrows during peer review?

I work at a big tech company and if I tried something similar, I'm pretty sure it would be caught internally. Even if I managed to pull it off, all it could realistically give me is a foot in the door. Some sketchy hiring manager isn't going to be able to just sweep some $500,000 signing bonus under the rug and $100k isn't unheard of for regular engineers here anyways. As far as compensation and promotion opportunities afterwards it stands little chance of mattering for that either. For the first few months nothing I did was even used performance reviews and it's a peer driven process to rate/promote engineers.

Combined that means that even if I wanted to do this, and I found a corrupt hiring manager that wanted to play ball, I'd have to sit on that IP for a few months after being hired, slowly introduce it into the codebase, alter it in response to peer review and to fit the new code base's coding styles, etc. In the end, that would prove useful for a grand total of one peer review cycle and then it's sink or swim on my own merits from that point forward.

All that to say, yes Nvidia doesn't want this kind of thing as a company, but there are still individuals who potentially stand to benefit and there's a lot of opportunities for Nvidia to catch this before it's accidentally shown on screen to the competitor it was stolen from this far down the line. I don't know much about Nvidia's corporate structure but it kinda seems like they're trying to avoid finding out about it rather than trying to actually prevent it.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#62

Post by andy99 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #28
takinola wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have direct knowledge of this company or the parties involved but I would be highly doubtful that Nvidia would want to have an employee steal the secrets of a competitor/partner. In my experience, companies of this size would aggressively not want tainted IP inside their companies. He would need to be bringing across something as valuable as AGI, cure for cancer, etc for it to be even worth considering. There…

The company I worked for, was paranoid as hell about IP in the code. They hired some source scanning firm, for a lot of money, to continually scan our codebase. They were mostly looking for GPL ( nasty, naasssssty GPL! ) code, but they also scanned for code that couldn't be accounted for in our "clean" repos. Not exactly sure how that worked (or even, if it worked at all. I think they brought smoke[0]). [0] https://w…

> nasty, naasssssty GPL!

What does that mean? Why would scanning for gpl code be looked at badly? It presumably means a company is proactively abiding by gpl licensing. The only thing better would be to use gpl and share their source as well. But of course it's a legit choice to just not use any gpl'd code.

It's probably more common to just turn a blind eye to gpl code, so it's good to see companies making sure they're on the right side of it.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#63

Post by FirmwareBurner »

szundi wrote: post #33
aaomidi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why commit a crime when you can simply throw money (of which you have a lot) at the problem? Indeed. But the stupidity of committing a crime does not actually stop companies from doing so. Mainly because the penalties for it are never harsh enough.

Stupidity in this case probably means low level employees cheating for benefits and career Nvidia can get out of this fairly low cost then Who knows

>Stupidity in this case probably means low level employees cheating for benefits and career

That's most likely the case here. FFS, the guy stole 6GB of proprietary data and police found the stolen design files pinned on his wall at home, so the guy was fully committed to his scammer role, and not just an accidental "oopsie I walked out with some proprietary IP by mistake, better discard it and keep this low key so nobody finds out".

By the looks of it, this guy, most likely a Bluecard(German equivalent of H1B) was just cheating and stealing his way up the career chain through the revolving door of the blue-chip automotive sector, until he got caught.

Companies both big and small, never ever encourage you to bring to work proprietary files and data from your previous workplaces, since that's a guaranteed lawsuit as these things always get out eventually.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#64

Post by zik »

juunpp wrote: post #7
pritambaral wrote: post #6

TFA makes it sound as if the entirety of the blame can be placed on one employee. Sure, his actions do seem to support that view, but then again, Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming w…

> Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. Yes, this happens all the time. > There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming with secrets. This is not a logical conclusion from the above. Hiring for the exp is fine. Hiring for the trade…

> No serious company would do the latter

It happens literally all the time:

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/27/anthony-l...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/22/23317502/xiaolang-zhang-p...

[3] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-engineer-sentenced...

[4] https://apnews.com/article/korea-samsung-china-copycat-semic...

[5] https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-may-face-difficul...

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#65

Post by FirmwareBurner »

AndroTux wrote: post #52
gremlinsinc wrote: post #23

> German police found its documentation and hardware pinned on Moniruzzaman's walls when his home was raided WTF actually prints out documentation? Let alone pins it to their walls? I mean....seriously does anybody actually do this?

Germans. We love printing, faxing and scanning stuff.

>Germans.

>Mohammad Moniruzzaman

Very German.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#67

Post by throwaway54_56 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #38
Symmetry wrote: post #21

One of the generally accepted reasons why its hard to get graphics companies to open source their drives has always been that everybody is violating everybody else's patents. And while everybody knows this making it too obvious is a legal disadvantage. But I hadn't expected it was also true of copyright.

> everybody is violating everybody else's patents Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you meaning it will still be clean room design, whereas this guy also blatantly copied the source code and design files which is a slam dunk lawsuit, hence why no company ever wants to have competitors' IP on their systems.

> Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you

The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#68

Post by FirmwareBurner »

throwaway54_56 wrote: post #67
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everybody is violating everybody else's patents Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you meaning it will still be clean room design, whereas this guy also blatantly copied the source code and design files which is a slam dunk lawsuit, hence why no company ever wants to have competitors' IP on their systems.

> Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality.

>The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea.

Have you ever seen patents? They rarely cover the implementation details, or at most they're intentionally super vague about that, most of the time it's just the general idea on how the widget would work and what it does, but not how to implement it technically.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#69

Post by Guthur »

juunpp wrote: post #7
pritambaral wrote: post #6

TFA makes it sound as if the entirety of the blame can be placed on one employee. Sure, his actions do seem to support that view, but then again, Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming w…

> Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. Yes, this happens all the time. > There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming with secrets. This is not a logical conclusion from the above. Hiring for the exp is fine. Hiring for the trade…

[flagged]

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#70

Post by atq2119 »

throwaway54_56 wrote: post #67
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everybody is violating everybody else's patents Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you meaning it will still be clean room design, whereas this guy also blatantly copied the source code and design files which is a slam dunk lawsuit, hence why no company ever wants to have competitors' IP on their systems.

> Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality.

Idea is a pretty general term. I have a bunch of patents and I would describe them all as patenting an idea (for how to achieve some goal).

The implementation or execution of the idea usually takes the form of some Verilog or some C++. That is covered by copyright.

The patent is for the idea. Which is part of why I'm so opposed to patents, not just in software. In other fields, like medicine, patents are perhaps for discoveries, which are IMHO similarly valuable as the execution. But ideas aren't that valuable, or shouldn't be.

Post reply on HN