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

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like with social media, all it takes is one person to not honor that request, and boom! your shit is out there. Sure, you can fire the offending party, but you can't just ask Co-pilot to not use your contributions. That's like asking the internet to give those pictures back. It ain't gonna happen.

It's quite a different from the analogy you suggest, as copilot is controlled by a single organisation and we know the address.

I’m assuming you’re implying that a firewall rule can be applied to block access from the corp network. However, this is clearly ignoring the fact that work from home exists where the corp network can be bypassed.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia still sells Quadro cards with the same chips as their gaming counterparts but much more VRAM. They are mainly used for workstations (CAD stuff, VFX, some CFD, maybe also some AI for small scale testing).

Didn't they rename things a while ago? I'm remembering this, though it's possible some things might have escaped the rename: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/quadro/

Ah yes, seems they did. I'm still on a Quadro RTX 4000 (Turing) so I thought they just slapped RTX on there after Quadro.

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

#223
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use GitHub, you feed OpenAI with your code as training data already, with GitLab you do the same for Google.

> If you use GitHub, you feed OpenAI with your code as training data already, with GitLab you do the same for Google. Do you have some evidence that github trained copilot on private repositories? They've been pretty clear about claiming they only used public repos. Also, gitlab is not owned by Google AFAICT but is instead a publicly traded company.

Some people complained that CoPilot outputted their rare code almost verbatim so I have no reason to trust whatever GitHub/Microsoft state.

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

#224
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily add terms to employment contracts that grant non-exclusive license to code you own that you use in the course of employment. I've done it many times. The only issue that has come up out of this is when someone wants a warrant of exclusivity downstream of that, but that has never been a showstopper.

Isn’t it almost always much better in acquisitions that the acquired company owns all of their code? I have been told so many times. Apparently the valuation is significantly impacted if they do not.

Companies use tons of open source code, it isn’t any different than that. And in many cases, these were huge companies, not startups. It was a shortcut to reimplementing the same code. No valuation impact.

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for this ChatGPT has a 'private' mode in which your conversation exists only while you keep it open. It's not used for training, an no human see it (presumably). The negative side is it disappears with no history, so you can't continue next day. That was introduced after complains similar to yours. Some companies put a total ban.

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Whoops. I posted a comment, then changed my mind and disagreed with my premise. So I went to delete it, but somehow didn't. Sorry for the noise.

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

#226
I have been a software engineer and writing code in one role or another for over 20 years. I do not think any of the code I have written in any of the previous job can be used in the next ones.

I wonder how close the two companies following eachother's footstep that the code could be reused this way.

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

#227
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CUDA. Non-free firmware. Still bad. And Radeon the same, propietary firmware run by the kernel is needed sometimes to even boot the GPU, it just happens Linux-Libre patches it and the Modesetting driver will work fine until you call 3D accelerated calls, when that happens the system may either panic or crash X entirely. That can be fixed by setting RenderAccel to none in the X.org config file.

These plus Raspberry Pi firmware, Intel ME, the list goes on and on. RISC-V is so exciting and interesting because it’s practically the first time in modern history 100% open source meets reality. People that act as though Nvidia is the exception here should just say they hate Nvidia for personal reasons - and that’s fair and fine. Again, they’re not angels and they do all kinds of shady things but to single them out…

I'm not acting - I'm genuinely saying, NVIDIA hates Free Software and this isn't a controversial stance. Always have. This is common knowledge and doesn't need sources, citations, etc.

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

#228

I seriously do not understand why any employee would steal their previous employers' code to use at a new employer. There's little-to-no personal upside, and only horrible downside if you get caught. I mean, this guy: > Moniruzzaman allegedly gave his personal email unauthorized access to Valeo's systems to steal "tens of thousands of files" and 6GB of source code shortly after that development... Valeo said its form…

Rationally seen, you'd at least have to assume to get caught at some point, and you'd have to assume the company will do anything to hold you alone accountable for damages, therefore making any possible upside a terrible risk reward scenario for you - so far true. Also if it was your own code, stealing it to "kickstart" your position at your new employer also feels like a rather bad deal: just bringing your knowledge…

One more possible explanation:

Maybe the employee sees greater potential at another employer (whether for positive impact on the world, or just better execution of their own vision, or whatever) and wants to pick up where they left off, instead of having to restart.

Everyone seems to assume some explanation involving money or laziness, but it could be for a less selfish (though still illegal/immoral) reason.

While I wouldn’t steal IP, I can appreciate a somewhat similar sentiment: looking forward to patents expiring. There are too many scenarios where a company creates and patents some new invention, only to produce some product that kinda sucks… until the patent expires and someone comes along and does it right and at a lower price.

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

#229
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has open source drivers so it's basically just NVIDIA that doesn't. Unless you already want to count intel, not sure if they count as actual products or are still in early access.

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...

Those are not the drivers, it's just a small portion of code with some constants and interfaces, IIRC.

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

#230
post #26
post #12

This often happens ingenuously, not out of calculated ill intent. Coders will keep code snippets and thoughts in personal knowledge tools like Notion, and then reuse them in different companies. Or contractors will straight up copy and paste code from source files of projects they worked on for different companies, thinking "I wrote it, so I could write it again, but why bother?", or something along those lines. Peop…

what about this: >Valeo said its former employee admitted to stealing its software and that German police found its documentation and hardware pinned on Moniruzzaman's walls when his home was raided. According to Bloomberg, he was already convicted of infringement of business secrets in a German court and was ordered to pay €14,400 ($15,750) in September.

Some people think it's not a big deal. I don't know why.
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