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Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

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Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#261

Post by MaxHoppersGhost »

realitysballs wrote: post #249
thruway516 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After all is said and done, Charlie Javice will be hanging out at a prison camp—probably down there with Holmes and Maxwell, because it's cushy—and do no more than 4 years I don't mind that outcome. She did not knowingly sell a product that could harm the public or abuse and traffic children, so it wouldn't be unfair or a travesty of justice like with those other two (especially that last one)

Agreed, hot take, but she defrauded a large corporate bank , big whoop if you ask me.

Strong anti fraud rules (even for massive banks) are a foundational part of a high functioning society.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#262

Post by lelanthran »

cheema33 wrote: post #136
tverbeure wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the nineties, Philips was days away from signing a licensing deal for a revolutionary video compression technology that compressed whole movies down to 8KB. The former Philips CTO was a strong believer. And then the inventor died and nothing ever came of it. To be a fly on the wall during due diligence meetings between Philips engineers and management. https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-man-who-was-paid-e113000-f…

Video codec compression scams remained popular even in early 2000s. I worked for a very large public tech company. One of the top 10 in that era. And they fell hard for scammers from Las Vegas that promised revolutionary audio/video compression. We had to sign all sorts of NDA and couldn't look under the hood of what they delivered to us under penalty of breach of contract and all that stuff. I "accidentally" ended u…

> I "accidentally" ended up looking under the hood and couldn't believe what I found. I reported the findings to my manager and told him to do what he wanted to with that information.

What did you find? Low bitrates? Smaller resolutions? Enquiring minds want to know.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#263

Post by komali2 »

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #261
realitysballs wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, hot take, but she defrauded a large corporate bank , big whoop if you ask me.

Strong anti fraud rules (even for massive banks) are a foundational part of a high functioning society.

I'm unconvinced. Banks wield massive political power through their capital, and so get away with highway robbery all the time. 2008 financial crisis comes to mind. It seems to me that the rules are one sided and so it seems this "foundational part" of high functioning society is just guarding the highwaymen with the cityguard, when the swords should be facing the other direction.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#264

Post by mkbkn »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #259
crossroadsguy wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a prison camp Is this different from a real/general prison? I mean does it have better facilities, space et cetera?

This is a good question. I did Googling. Here is what I found: From the US Federal Bureau of Prisons: https://www.bop.gov/about/facilities/federal_prisons.jsp > Minimum security institutions, also known as Federal Prison Camps (FPCs), have dormitory housing, a relatively low staff-to-inmate ratio, and limited or no perimeter fencing. These institutions are work- and program-oriented. The Elizabeth Holmes Wiki page sa…

Well, someone wished her too well.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#265

Post by marcus_holmes »

TuringNYC wrote: post #12

>> A prosecutor, Micah Fergenson, though, said JPMorgan “didn’t get a functioning business” in exchange for its investment. “They acquired a crime scene.” I do not understand how an acquisition this big got thru due diligence without noticing all the fake users. Anyone in corporate M&A know if it is normal to spend this much money without inspecting the goods? Seems like the most basic of OLAP queries and two days of…

This. Why bother going through DD properly if you can just sue the seller later if it turns out everything isn't what you expected?

I get that this is about the seller lying during the sale process, which is appropriate imho, you shouldn't be able to just lie about stuff like this. But it's the DD team's job to spot this stuff, that's what DD is all about. I notice the judge criticised the bank as well, which is a step in the right direction.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#266

Post by astrange »

lumost wrote: post #148
cheema33 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video codec compression scams remained popular even in early 2000s. I worked for a very large public tech company. One of the top 10 in that era. And they fell hard for scammers from Las Vegas that promised revolutionary audio/video compression. We had to sign all sorts of NDA and couldn't look under the hood of what they delivered to us under penalty of breach of contract and all that stuff. I "accidentally" ended u…

Was the scam that the codec had the raw video in it, so the "files" could be made trivially small?

I mean, that would work. It's going to be the reason AI video compression works; people are okay with an AI model being 1GB but they wouldn't put up with libavcodec being 1GB.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#267

Post by astrange »

aeve890 wrote: post #179
mdemare wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So bizarre! It really shook my belief in Philips' competence at the time. I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in. I would hate to think so ill of any of my friends or colleagues to think that they could believe such an obvious fraud.

Is it a sort of reversible pseudo-hashing function even possible? Or something like a seed in a deterministic procedural generator. You could store arbitrary data in a few bits. 8kb for all the redundancies and metadata even. On a second thought, the compression alone would destroy information. NVM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_quantization

https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/45719/perceptual-n...

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#268

Post by pverheggen »

kstrauser wrote: post #244
bruce511 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A variation on this would work, but alas we don't have the math tools as yet. The idea (not mine) is that you can think of data as "very large numbers". So a 4096 bit number is just a big number. Well, we have a short way to generate big numbers. x^y. So given a big number (say 800 000 bits) we could generate a (Hopefully short) expression of the form a^b + (or minus) c^d + ... etc. Unfortunately the "factorizing" (a…

It would not work for arbitrary inputs. See the pigeonhole principal: you can’t represent all possible n-bit values with fewer than n bits, because otherwise you’d have at least one case where multiple input values map to the same output value. On decompression, which one do you go with? And if that’s not convincing, then consider that any perfect compression scheme would be able to compress its own output even small…

To add to this, useful compression algorithms exploit patterns in the input data. A common pattern to target is repetition, since most files contain lots of repeated byte sequences.

The pattern that factorization targets are numbers that factor well. I doubt this is a pattern you’d find in any file worth compressing, it doesn’t have a clear relationship to file data.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#269

Post by hamburglar »

lelanthran wrote: post #262
cheema33 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video codec compression scams remained popular even in early 2000s. I worked for a very large public tech company. One of the top 10 in that era. And they fell hard for scammers from Las Vegas that promised revolutionary audio/video compression. We had to sign all sorts of NDA and couldn't look under the hood of what they delivered to us under penalty of breach of contract and all that stuff. I "accidentally" ended u…

> I "accidentally" ended up looking under the hood and couldn't believe what I found. I reported the findings to my manager and told him to do what he wanted to with that information. What did you find? Low bitrates? Smaller resolutions? Enquiring minds want to know.

Terrible weissman scores.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#270

Post by TwoNineFive »

wkoszek wrote: post #46

It's interesting how nobody talks about due-diligence being completely broken. We raised $$$ from many VCs and the DD for some of them was crazy: line item by line item with calls to customers etc. Tech folks were on phone with me and had to explain them stuff step by step, revealing a lot of confidential recipes. Also did this for bigger customers. And the $175M deal.. isn't there an earnout? Like $10M cash now, 1/4…

Anyone who was an adult in this industry back in 2021 remembers the wacky funding shit going on.

This is not surprising in any way.

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