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AMD Employee Charged With Stealing Intel Secrets
IWonderWhatICanPutInThisFieldWithoutBeingDeleted writes "A man who once worked for Intel and then jumped ship to join AMD has been accused of stealing his erstwhile employer's chip secrets. Federal detectives allege they discovered 19 CAD designs and more than 100 pages of confidential Intel documentation."
this substantiates allegations made here which were widely mocked at the time.
It was the design of the Pentium Pro's floating point processor.
Industries still compete the "old fashioned" way.
News at 11.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
The irony is that his new employer (AMD) would never touch the stolen info with a 10-foot pole. The company I work with (also in the IT sector but not hardware) has very, very clear policies around competitive information. They know just how badly it would go for them if they made use of stolen information brought in by a new (or even existing) employee.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Toyota and Ferrari?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Well, not really.
Pani's alleged motive: to impress his new employer, say the Feds. They added that there is no evidence that AMD condoned or was even aware of Pani's alleged actions, which the FBI said the engineer admitted to during a interview in late July.
Wait, so does this mean he was going to pass off intel's technology as his own - which he would undoubtedly be caught out on - or is AMD lying about this? It's not like he was only hired a week ago. I'm just wondering how he could impress his new employer without actually giving anything away.
He took the "Intel Inside" campaign too far.
Poaching the dumb employees from your competitor is probably not the most sound business plan, either.
I really have to wonder how significant the information that Intel could get out of these documents is. It seems to me that a few CAD designs and some "confidential" documentation wouldn't be enough to actually give AMD an edge in the market. Even if this information did include Intel "secrets" would they really be things that AMD could implement?
The guy says he copied of the documents "out of curiosity", which doesn't actually strike me as that implausible. I know I have copies of software packages being licensed for $500,000+ to my previous employer. It's not like I'm going to try to use it to make a profit, I just find it interesting stuff and want to be able to keep it.
He obviously won't be getting a job anywhere else in the industry again. No one's going to hire a guy that's going to steal your IP when he leaves.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
he had the plans for Intel's newest chip, codenamed "Titanic"
And you think all that poaching Google do, especially from MS and other top tech firms, is purely for the "talent"? At a peer-driven firm, you don't need to make plagiarism official policy, you just create an environment of "trust" where that sort of thing'll get talked about at lunchtime and you're sorted.
Idiot.
Ah, thats why we have AMD's X2 and Intel's Dual-Core which are *so* similar.
slashdot rocks
NINTEEN Computer Aided Design Designs? We should have never approved that New Technology Technology.
So Intel pull a Ferrari and take a leaf out of spygate?
http://www.metro.co.uk/sport/formulaone/article.html?in_article_id=65980&in_page_id=58
LeMans and Rheims, 1950-1960.
BTW - if you ar egoing to do car analogies people, THOSE are cars!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
CAD = Computer-aided design
CAD designs = Computer-aided design designs
Pani (Alleged Thief) may have been involved in partial involvement in the design, and therefore wanted to keep a record of the end product of his work. Of course, he told authorities it was because he was "curious".
What isnt mentioned is that he took the goods from intel because the guys at AMD needed a laugh!
*ducks*
I doubt "dumb" or "thief" was on his resumee.
No it was this:
Obvious paid M$ shill.
There's an amazing thing done by HP in the article. It seems their advertising department contacted Gerry Anderson about providing digital supermarionation effects for their online ads. You can see what can only be described as one of the Thunderbirds plugging energy-efficient desktops.
Here's another case that's fairly similar. An employee at one of Coke Cola's offices tried selling the recipe to Pepsi, except Pepsi informed Coke of what had happened.
Didn't this come out days ago?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The sad thing is that such laws are only respected in countries like the US and UK.
Soon countries like China will be able to have much better technologies because they can take the best from all sides and create a super product. Even if the US and UK forbid the importation of such products, companies in the US and UK would be at a disadvantage selling inferior product to other countries.
Patents and copyrights will prove to be our downfall since they no longer encourage progress but prevent it.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I'm married. My wife keeps my penis in a mason jar under the sink. It only comes out when she wants it.
IWonderWhatICanStealFromMyPreviousEmployerWithoutBeingCaught?
doesn't matter, no one can help amd now (except for intel chip designs, of course... oh perfect!)
Is that I frequently have ideas at home. And write them down. And later use them at work.
Would the discovery of these documents in my home constitute evidence of "stealing trade secrets" in the eyes of my employer? If I decided to leave my current employer and work for the competition, would those hobby projects of mine be a liability?
I'm just curious, because I do quite a bit of independent development, and from time to time, it becomes valuable at work.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
How do people think that they're going to pass this along and not get caught by some method?
Hell, after the Coca Cola incident I would be fearful of having my new employer even know I have such information, let alone use it in some manner.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
..very bad. I hope AMD doesn't catch too much shit for this guys actions.
For an engineering document. Could just be one PDF spec document for a small processor, or maybe an instruction set manual.
19 CAD designs? Do they mean 19 full chip designs or just 19 verilog source files?
I'd be curious to know how big this thing really is. I bet that I could have that amount of cruft lying around somewhere from one of my previous jobs.
. . . to Intel gathering ;)
1) Never take your work home with you (his home was raided)
2) Encryption is your friend
Some of the posts bring up a good point here. If I gain insights into some architecture I can experience into what the usual problems are, what to expect and also how to solve them. So now if I jopin a competitor I cannot use that experience to design something related? Where is the line drawn between IP theft and experience? Does it mean that every company can forbid an employee from joining its competitor?
Intel pays some guy under the table to "quit" and go work for AMD... oh, and take this envelope with you, hint hint nudge nudge.
Instant competition torpedo.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
This title makes it sound like AMD had an involvement with industrial espionage in this case when really, AMD had no idea that the said person had stolen secrets. Intel noticed weird access logs, then contacted the FBI and now the guy's passport has been revoked, his job at AMD and Intel terminated. He is going to a Federal PMITA prison for sure.
At least we now know AMD is hiring again!
No I'm not trolling.
This type of behavior is required and expected.
How many Viagra's are there now? Five?
How many Statins are there now? Six?
How many SRIs are there now? Six?
Sorry, couldn't resist the irony of this being a Federal Gubment thing and the FDA is the Feds.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
People marry people who cheated on their former spouse all the time...
The same principle applies.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The only way not to steal IP from a previous employer is to have your brain erased.
Forget the stupid Ben Afflek movie, read the Philip K. Dick short story "Paycheck."
You cannot take anything written, on paper or in electronic form, from a previous employer to a new one.
If you take it with you home on a USB stick you accidentally left in your empty coffee mug, this is not considered a crisis. Companies will not typically demand an audit of your USB activity for the last five years, or raid your house. You must however not breathe a word about any such written, hardform material to your new employer.
What you CAN do, and in many cases is EXPECTED to, is to bring things IN YOUR HEAD. This isn't industry espionage, it's cross-pollination and best-of-breed implementation. Obviously so long as your competitor does not hold patents that are being breached, your new employer will be very interested to hear about what they are doing. This applies at least within the financial sector.
In effect:
Things in memory good
Things on paper extremely bad and will ruin your life
P53.989484848488889999999 according to Intel.
But it won't be free... It's not like AMD is going to publicly disclose what they stole from Intel...
What's the value of information that you don't know?
the Ferrari and McLaren fiasco that occurred in 2006 (maybe 2005) and was the focus of an article in Wired last year I believe. A guy who had been a mechanic during his entire career at Ferrari thought he would get a promotion when a senior engineer decided to leave. Someone else got the job from another department so the guy left to work for McLaren. Through various other events the guy was eventually convinced to acquire trade secrets of Ferrari F1 cars. Word quickly spread through the rank and file at McLaren what was acquired but the CEO denied it and was unaware of it initially. McLaren later had to forfeit their points for that racing year.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Hey moderators, why are the two above comments marked insightful? The story is about computer chips, not sports cars. Maybe you meant offtopic?
Unless AMD wants to go backwards in technology to front side bus and scotch taped quad-core.
... AMD didn't copy their off-chip memory controller.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p