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TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

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Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#111
They said [1] in article but put iPhone 18 chip process just for clickbait… Disappointed.

[1] No details have been shared on the nature of the information obtained. It is likely that it relates to the 2nm process in general rather than anything specific to Apple’s A20 chip.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#112
post #67
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me companies ... don't care out side some easy to do basic things. But when push comes to shove if manufacturing is cheaper in a country where lots of folks want to steal your things. -shrug- Short term profits win.

am i crazy for not caring if a company in a foreign country obtains trade secrets and manufactures the same thing? like we're all humans and we all want access to whatever it is they're building, it seems like more people building the thing is a good thing. if that impacts Samsung's profits, why do I care? its not like corporations give a shit about me

Yes, because if you tolerate that you disincentivize actually developing the IP in question in favour of stealing everyone else's, which leads to nothing being developed.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#114

Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was ab…

This abuse of Excel might be in the running for a new form of esports.

Roko's Basilisk or whatever it is should more properly be called Excel's Visual Basicilisk - once Excel becomes self-aware it is going to punish everyone who tortured it for decades.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#115
post #23

Industrial espionage has to be totally insane to defend against these days.

Just knowing how the thing is built doesn't seem to be enough. Comac still sources its jet engines from Pratt and Whitney for instance, despite many years of trying no local manufacturer has been able to build them to the same spec.

The product I oversee at my job is something that can only be built by people who are intimately aware of the process and have a strong understanding of the underlying engineering.

We could hand the full project file to a competitor and they almost certainly would not be able to build functional units. The failure points are fractal, so you need a strong intuition about what part you are installing, what qualities an ideal part has, what qualities the one in your hand has, how you might install it differently because of those qualities, and/or how you might change a later process to accommodate it. Or if the part should just be junked. The process is fraught with seemingly good intuitions that will ultimately lead you to failure as well.

These units also cannot be reworked, reused, or repaired, so any mistake before finalizing the build junks the entire thing.

For extremely low-entropy products, mother nature is incredibly unforgiving.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#116

Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was ab…

This abuse of Excel might be in the running for a new form of esports.

It's always worth remembering there's exactly one reason Excel is abused -- IT isn't giving "non-developers" access to tools they need to automate their work.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#117
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frequently wonder what steps SpaceX security has to take, given the insane geopolitical significance of reusable rockets and cheap access to orbit.

There is a very nice chapter in the somewhat dated but classic book Business Adventures [1] on trade-secrets and what happens when employees of one company move to another. In chapter 11, "A man, his knowledge, and his job", there is a story of a "space-suit" manufacturer Goodrich suing an employee for moving to its rival Latex for stealing trade-secrets. The story is timely in context of Meta hiring researchers from…

You could also argue that they're hiring people for the general expertise they have in developing frontier LLMs. Distinguishing trade secrets from general knowledge is difficult and employees building the latter to make them more valuable to new employers is an explicit policy goal of US employment law.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#118
post #93

Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was ab…

It is great that particular tools enable employees automate stuff and make their work more effective. From developer point of view I see that the effort would most certainly be diverted in another kind of solution. But yeah, "citizen developer" stuff is a thing that microsoft pushes especially in Power Platform / Canvas Apps - one programs with WYSIWIG and Excel-like formulas (PowerFX) But then again I wonder who are…

where else can you run vba these days?

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#119
post #23

Industrial espionage has to be totally insane to defend against these days.

Just knowing how the thing is built doesn't seem to be enough. Comac still sources its jet engines from Pratt and Whitney for instance, despite many years of trying no local manufacturer has been able to build them to the same spec.

We don’t have sensors that can grok the full building process that deep human experts have.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#120
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, this is admittedly a little tinfoil, but I wouldn't be surprised if Musk is happy for some degree of espionage to happen. If it looked like there was a possibility of China getting this capability first, it would light a fire under the US government to give financial and regulatory assistance to the Starship program.

Musk does seem to think in terms of how much money he can get from the government for his companies. But to be fair, government subsidies are a successful strategy for entrepreneurs who want to make a lot of money. Maybe they shouldn't be? And I think honest people can have that debate. But you can't really argue against the effectiveness of government subsidy as a path to prosperity for the guy getting the money.

It’s primarily in the government interest in subsidising, except when it’s a corrupted subsidy.
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