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Alphabet's Waymo Sues Uber For Allegedly Stealing Self-Driving Secrets (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: It took Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo seven years to design and build a laser-scanning system to guide its self-driving cars. Uber Technologies Inc. allegedly did it in nine months. Waymo claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that was possible because a former employee stole the designs and technology and started a new company. Waymo accuses several employees of Otto, a self-driving startup Uber acquired in August for $680 million, of lifting technical information from Google's autonomous car project. The "calculated theft" of Alphabet's technology earned Otto's employees more than $500 million, according to the complaint in San Francisco federal court. The claims in Thursday's case include unfair competition, patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation. Waymo was inadvertently copied on an e-mail from one of its vendors, which had an attachment showing an Uber lidar circuit board that had a "striking resemblance" to Waymo's design, according to the complaint. Anthony Levandowski, a former manager at Waymo, in December 2015 downloaded more than 14,000 proprietary and confidential files, including the lidar circuit board designs, according to the complaint. He also allegedly created a domain name for his new company and confided in some of his Waymo colleagues of plans to "replicate" its technology for a competitor. Levandowski left Waymo in January 2016 and went on in May to form Otto LLC, which planned to develop hardware and software for autonomous vehicles.
Waymo was inadvertently copied on an e-mail from one of its vendors, which had an attachment showing an Uber lidar circuit board that had a "striking resemblance" to Waymo's design, according to the complaint
Remember the thread yesterday about police subpoenaing Amazaon's Alexa recordings on a murder investigation? Can an email provider such as google or microsoft be required to supply email threads in a discovery proceeding? What about third party planning/scheduling/defect management/configuration management software? It is one thing if the data resides in the customer's computers/servers and the software vendor never had access to the data. But now a days I see lots of "cloud based" software doing this. Many companies use companies with names like AgileRally or CloudCentral. The entire history of user stories, discussions, projects plans, defects and corrections are archived at some fine grained detail in their servers. If they get subpoenaed in some discovery proceeding on such a patent lawsuit, how strongly would they protect their client's confidentiality? They might have contract to protect it, but at some point the cost of protecting the client might not be worth it for them and they might throw them under the bus.
Unless it is impossible for them to get the data. It is possible to create the system such that all the databases reside in the client's computer or servers. The software provider's site only runs the code and all access to the data base are funneled through client's servers and it would be impossible for the vendor to get the data without the cooperation of the client. Unless such protections are employed it would be a folly for R&D heavy companies to house their data outside their servers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That's because Uber's business model is literally "ignore regulation". It sustains itself only because there are enough desperate employe^Wcontractors that the high churn doesn't affect their bottom line too much. Oh, and they're great at stalking ex partners of employees, so anyone with insider knowledge is going to be a little scared. Which isn't surprising, considering the CEO is an unabashed misogynist whose success is based entirely off having less idea of ethics than pretty much any tech CEO of any American tech darling founded since 2000. It seems now that they also engage in corporate espionage.
When Objectivism is consigned to the same dustbin of extremist history as Marxism, I hope undergrads will be given Uber as a case study. Although at least Marxism has some good critique of consumerism - shame about all the fire-and-brimstone dialectical materialism that wouldn't look out of place in the Book of Revelations.
If Uber's vehicle age rules apply in the Phillippines and in other nations that are much financially poorer than the United States and Western Europe, then it would make sense that Uber rides would be more luxurious. Base taxis may well be whatever vehicle can be made to move under its own power and has accommodations for a passenger.
If Uber were priced in US and other Western markets where it naturally would be if it complied with the laws and regulations, it would probably occupy a tier somewhere between a conventional taxi and a luxury sedan service. Instead passenger livery regulations are violated and drivers are apparently subject to ridiculous shifts in order to pay for the cars they bought through the company store.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.