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Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

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Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#471

Post by orochimaaru »

kshacker wrote: post #439
orochimaaru wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is standard practice in all big companies. Everything is tracked and recorded. If you want to say something to a colleague that you don’t want management to know - use your personal phone and talk at a coffee shop or bar in person.

Asking for a friend :) On VPN at home, using my work laptop, I happen to browse some non-decent content, more than once, maybe routinely. Is that all tracked or do VPNs have routing to use VPN only for company network, and leave NSFW be handled by my ISP? Or even if is going via ISP and not company network, are the companies usually able to track what all sites I visit Not a Google employee BTW, but work for a compan…

Is he on the corporate network on his work vpn? If so, this is recorded. You have to go via corporate proxies and use corporate dns. That’s easily trackable.

If he’s installed something like mullvad on his work laptop and he’s able to tunnel out from the corporate network, he’s probably safe from the content but has broken policy on unauthorized software, the intent of which can be malicious.

They won’t care in general. But if they want to get rid of him they’ll have the info ready.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#472

Post by Thorrez »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #143
ithkuil wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps just perhaps the task is a bit harder than what you make it sound like Instances of people sharing the same name are far more common in china than elsewhere. For example there are more than 30 thousand people called "Wang Wei". The fact is complicated by the fact that the writing systems are different and transliteration errors are commonplace.

How many people named Wang Wei in any given year become the officers of companies? Google could even automate this with an email, opting into which would be a requirement for any senior employee handling the kind of information the US government cares about. "A person sharing your name has registered a company in China, as of 2024-03-07. To affirm that you are not related to this person, please click this link. If yo…

>opting into which would be a requirement for any senior employee

According to the article, he was a junior employee.

>Edit: obviously, criminals don't mark the "yes I'm a criminal box" on forms. That's not the purpose it's there to serve.

What purpose would it serve? Would it have prevented this case?

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#473

Post by [deleted] »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #143
ithkuil wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps just perhaps the task is a bit harder than what you make it sound like Instances of people sharing the same name are far more common in china than elsewhere. For example there are more than 30 thousand people called "Wang Wei". The fact is complicated by the fact that the writing systems are different and transliteration errors are commonplace.

How many people named Wang Wei in any given year become the officers of companies? Google could even automate this with an email, opting into which would be a requirement for any senior employee handling the kind of information the US government cares about. "A person sharing your name has registered a company in China, as of 2024-03-07. To affirm that you are not related to this person, please click this link. If yo…

[deleted]

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#474

Post by jjmarr »

> Within weeks of the theft starting, prosecutors say, Ding was offered the position of chief technology officer at an early-stage technology company in China that touted its use of AI technology and that offered him a monthly salary of about $14,800, plus an annual bonus and company stock.

Crime doesn't pay. That's a pretty lackluster bribe for a mid-career AI expert. I wonder if there's more behind it.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#475

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

xattt wrote: post #403
alsetmusic wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a strong distrust for authority, but even I would report espionage and IP theft of this sort. Downloading a movie doesn't bother me. Running a site for others to download movies doesn't bother me. But being a snake to go defraud a company to steal the hard work of others so your own illicit company can turn a profit off said labor by others irks me. Do your own R&D. Did you ever consider doing raising a red fl…

If anything is going to unite two groups of people who are “naturally” on opposite sides of a political spectrum, it’s going to be stopping treasonous activities. I airquote naturally because it’s obvious that foreign interference is at play, based on the laissez-faire attitude towards this sort of thing by some groups.

Correct. The left and the right may be at loggerheads about the best way to manage america.

Yet, the vast majority of both camps still think of themselves as american. Neither group will take kindly for others to present themselves as american, to then proceed steal from other americans for the benefit of non-americans.

We are all part of the same macro-tribe after all.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#476

Post by nova22033 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #175
atonse wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm that seems like a clear cut case to report to the FBI. Yeah, assuming that they were walking around telling people about it.

The FBI gets more credible reports than it has the labor to investigate. Not to mention in this example no crime even yet occurred.

Not to mention in this example no crime even yet occurred.

OP...you should definitely report this to the FBI.

If you try to hire a hitman, the FBI will definitely investigate even though no crime has been committed.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#477

Post by toss1 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #388
toss1 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "it's not my problem" But you do not live there, you live in the West. Just because the problem is diffuse and distant for you now, does not mean it is not your problem. If we all fail to treat it as the problem, it will become concentrated and local here also. (but sure, right now, it's more convenient to ignore it and party)

It seems awfully convenient that when western corporations were cutting jobs and outsourcing to China we were told to take one for the team capitalism. Same concerns about human rights in China existed. And now when cheaper Chinese cars/5G/etc threaten profits, we are again told to take one for the team. I don’t think we get to party, looks a bit like a racket

I completely agree — the entire concept of "manufacturing isn't important, outsource it to the cheapest poor countries" is one of the most insane and fundamentally stupid strategic failures in history.

While the west earned a few year's worth of higher profits by outsourcing their entire manufacturing base, intellectual property advantage, and middle class lifestyle to China, China created a strategic dependency, modernized military, and massive ability to backdoor and spy on it's adversaries, as well as global advantage in key markets.

Yes, that was extremely costly for the western working and middle class, and as you point out, even stupidly short-sighted for the capital class.

However, reversing that and bringing key manufacturing back to the democratic allies (US, EU, Japan, SK, AUS, etc.) will massively benefit workers who will no longer be competing with China's cheap labor. So, I'm not sure how this is 'taking one for the team'?

(And yes, the strategic concept that open trade and info flow will naturally bring democracy, based on the post-WWII experience of EU and Japan rebuilding efforts, massively failed; all it did was empower the dictators in CCP and RU. So, the human rights issues for Chinese workers still exists, but they got a couple decades of improved economics. Too bad we can't just depose China's and Russia's leadership and bring real progress,, but if we don't preserve our own democracy, we'll never be able to help anyone else).

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#478

Post by edgyquant »

freedomben wrote: post #152
edgyquant wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No and I also don’t think American companies should be employing citizens of foreign adversaries. That this is controversial shows just how naive the average American is and how unsustainable we are as a civilization these days.

> That this is controversial shows just how naive the average American is and how unsustainable we are as a civilization these days. IMHO, dismissing any potential opposition as "naive" before you've even heard it, is about as naive as it gets. It also overshadows what otherwise might have been an interesting discussion point by declaring your unwillingness to actually discuss the point.

No it is naive to favor employing citizens of a foreign adversary. There is no argument for this that isn’t based on emotions and “not being mean”

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#479

Post by hayst4ck »

throw393200 wrote: post #437
hnburnsy wrote: post #373

Here is the indictment since AP News can't be bothered to link to it... https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1341356/dl?inline

There have been a lot of falsely accused "spies" recently like Xiaoxing Xi, Sherry Chen, and Anming Hu. All charges were eventually dropped. I wonder what will happen with this case.

Without an idea of how many cases were not dropped, it's hard to understand how valid what I feel you are implying is. There will always be false positives, so the existence of false positives is not surprising. It's upsetting and those people are owed reparations, but it wouldn't be unexpected.

Without any context it implies that the US is going on nationality motivated witch hunts, which might be true, particularly in the Trump era, but I also would be astonished if China did not have significant penetration into academia and American companies.

We know based on China's cyber operations that they are particularly interested in industrial secrets.

Given the existence of Chinese police operating on US soil, I doubt the characterization of witch hunts. I've read more than one compelling case of Chinese operatives courting IP theft too, including hearing one on NPR, which isn't exactly a conservative mouthpiece. China openly used organized crime to attempt to put down protests in Hong Kong in 2019. China has a history of arbitrarily arresting foreigners.

> We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. -- FBI director Christopher Wray, July 2020

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#480

Post by prepend »

mvdtnz wrote: post #362
prepend wrote: post #357

It’s interesting to me that google doesn’t do a security clearance review on its engineers. I’ve had a security clearance in the past and there’s no way a foreign national passes. I got questioned significantly about a family member who was a citizen of another country. I wonder if it’s just a matter of time.

Is it your contention that Google should never hire anyone born outside of USA or without USA citizenship? Do you realise how much of their workforce that would preclude?

It precludes a great many people.

In my example, the US won’t grant security clearance to a foreign national. Even if you are a permanent resident, you don’t get clearance without citizenship.

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