TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by K0balt » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #210

K0balt wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Realistically speaking the value that a diemaker brings should easily be worth 2x or more their current scale. The SmarterEveryDay piece was disheartening for sure, echoes what I have been singing from the rooftops ever since the government dropped the USA origin of manufacturing requirements for all purchases. Sure, it was a kind of corporate welfare, and it made for a tricky incentive misalignment, but it kept…

As far as I understand you still have to buy US, and need approval if you cannot source domestically. All our military work still uses US electronics shops and machine shops.

The window has shifted as to what constitutes “us made” though. For most things “US assembled” is the norm, and when you get out into things like office supplies, vehicles, and construction materials it’s often far from true domestic manufacturing. For strategic military stuff it’s better, but often at the cost of using 1990s tech because we don’t make the newer stuff here. (It also has the effect of making things more repairable, but that argument gets weaker and weaker as time goes on)

At this point I think in practice it’s a preference for US manufacturers but a long way from robust enough to establish domestic supply chains.

Also -a lot- of military purchases are local, discretionary on a credit card, and there is no oversight on the origin there- it’s whatever they need from office max or the hardware store.

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

#212

Post by garyfirestorm » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 2:04 AM UTC

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #157

garyfirestorm wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. Working in an automotive OEM the entire company works on excel specifically excel vb scripts. No one knows why and no one has figured out how we got here. But it’s slow and steady abuse excel.

How do you do fellow Germans

No no I work for one of the big 3 American OEM

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

#213

Post by cauefcr » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 3:55 AM UTC

fuzzfactor wrote: post #207

ethbr1 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can only imagine the thousands of lines of code I saved by using Excel '97 for a scientific tabular calculation effort alone. Because I had already done about the same thing in HP basic before PC's existed, when there wasn't a spreadsheet app anyway. And it was on my mind the whole time. It didn't take many more years before clients wanted their results in XLS on one tab and the invoice on another tab. Rather than…

This is horrible, i love it.

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

#214

Post by hulitu » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

burnt-resistor wrote: post #198

sgarland wrote: post #32

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 is a pathology of megacorps who don't continually reinvest in process and support infrastructure and instead abuse backoffice desktop software inefficiently. In 20/20 retrospect, it should've been converted from Excel to a proper app as soon as it became a bottleneck.

> it should've been converted from Excel to a proper app as soon as it became a bottleneck.

Converting costs money. Unless there is a good reason, nobody will do it.

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

#215

Post by mooglevich » Thu, Aug 14, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

bwfan123 wrote: post #63

sneak wrote: 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…

FWIW, outside of the chapter bwfan123 references, this entire book is an excellent read. Great stories and even better writing - it's one of my personal faves :)