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Uber Finds One Allegedly Stolen Waymo File -- On An Employee's Personal Device (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the things-intensify dept.

Uber said today that it had found one of the documents Waymo alleges was stolen by a former employee -- who left its self-driving car effort to join Uber's -- on the employee's personal computer. From a report on TechCrunch: The document was found on a personal device belonging to Sameer Kshirsagar, Uber's attorney Arturo Gonzalez said at a court hearing today. It's the first time that Uber has acknowledged that any of Waymo's documents are in the possession of any Uber employees. However, Uber emphasized that the document was not found on Uber's computers. "We did collect documents from him and thus far we have only found one document from his computers that matches the documents identified in the complaint," Gonzalez said. Waymo claims that Kshirsagar downloaded several confidential documents in June 2016, one month before resigning and joining Anthony Levandowski at Uber. The names of the five specific documents are partially redacted in court filings, but one references "laser questions" and another "lens placement."

36 comments

  1. Wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So if I'm understanding this correctly, in their hunt for waymo documents, they raided and searched all of their employees personal machines? This doesn't smell right. Either they massively broke the law, or they're full of shit. Searching the employees machine means searching their work machine, not their personal machine.

    Am I misunderstanding something?

    1. Re: Wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perhaps they told said employee that if he/she had anything they should offer it up now and they'll take care of it as otherwise it'll become difficult.

    2. Re:Wait by Luthair · · Score: 1

      Uber - "let us search your stuff or you are fired"

      If memory serves there was a story about how Apple would do that. I recall they'd show up with security, if you didn't consent they'd escort you out on the spot.

    3. Re:Wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uber - "let us search your stuff or you are fired"

      Former Employee - I don't work for Uber.

    4. Re:Wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apple is absolutely paranoid about secrecy about product releases, internal affairs, etc. from what I've heard.

      What also doesn't smell right is this -- Why would Uber go to any great lengths to obtain these files? They're legally bound to "attempt" to produce the documents, but the spirit of the law is very different from the letter of the law. Why lift a finger any more than they were legally required to do so?

      Speaking in evil company mode, it's not in their best interest to find those documents, regardless of who possesses them and what machine they're on.

    5. Re:Wait by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This is why I have *no* work contamination of my personal machines.
      I only bring my phone to work, and I concede they can search the filesystem if they want (it's really no different than a USB drive afterall).

      If they expected to search my home machine I'd refuse and lawyer up when they tried to discipline me for it.

      On a related note:
      Uber is handling this all sorts of wrong.

      This happened while I was at Intel, an employee grabbed a stack of confidential and top secret Itanium docs and *while on sabbatical* got a job at AMD. When AMD found out he stole the IP (to help him get a leg up at his new employer) they called Intel, and the FBI; obviously sacking the guy as well.

      There is a story (I don't know if true) about a guy getting the formula for Coke and offering to sell it to Pepsi. Pepsi called Coke and asked how they wanted to handle it. The decision was that Pepsi would offer to buy the formula. When the guy came in to sell it, the Pepsi exec accepted the envelope of docs, handed them to a waiting Coke lawyer, and nodded to the waiting FBI agent to arrest the guy.

      In both these cases the company potentially receiving the secret sauce for a competitor made great efforts to inform said competitor and distance themselves from *any* question of impropriety. How is it that Uber saw no need for verifying poached employees brought nothing but what was in their heads with them from the competition?

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    6. Re:Wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "How is it that Uber saw no need for verifying poached employees brought nothing but what was in their heads with them from the competition?"

      Disruption -- the 2017 version of 1999's "eyeballs" in the Second Dotcom Bubble. The rules don't apply anymore.

      What's interesting about chip manufacturing is that the only thing protecting the company is patents -- anyone with a microscope can see things like structure and design -- I'm guessing whatever the employee stole had something to do with a secret part of the actual manufacturing process or software that goes into it?

    7. Re:Wait by russotto · · Score: 1

      So if I'm understanding this correctly, in their hunt for waymo documents, they raided and searched all of their employees personal machines?

      No, they searched the machines of the employees named. Presumably with their permission, since one of them -- Levandowski -- didn't co-operate.

    8. Re:Wait by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      Actually, even with a scope you can't reverse an entire design these days.

      The dopant wells are too small to reliably measure, and there's just too much going on in the interconnect above the poly layer to actually capture it all correctly. It's like OCR where you read an e as an o or an l as a 1 or I.

      Conceptually you can reverse an entire chip. Pragmatically you can only really see the overall structure of the die layout and maybe home in on how they're making their gates and oxide layers.

      As to what he stole:
      * Itanium VLIW instruction decoder logic and specification.
      * VLIW to x86 code manipulations
      * Cache coherency algos
      and other stuff I don't remember anymore.

      It caused a *huge* change in how internal sensitive docs were handled:
      - cube searches, if you left red or orange covered docs out (even to go take a piss) you could be written up
      - physical IP had to be accounted for at a much more detailed level (though I think that was more related to a guy selling engineering samples on eBay)
      - New on-line format for PDFs of documents using "authentica" application that killed the ability to screen cap (a print screen had the Authentica logo sprayed all over the place where the document was)
      - printed copies had non-obvious watermarking applied (in addition to the big red watermark across each page diagonally with your name on it) to catch OCR or scan and remove red layer attempts at copying.

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    9. Re:Wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How is it that Uber saw no need for verifying poached employees brought nothing but what was in their heads with them from the competition?

      It's Uber. You had to ask?

    10. Re:Wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I had a situation like this once, some years back. I was working at a large publicly traded company and the CEO retired. Instead of getting someone qualified, the primary stock holder and board chairman forced a friend in as CEO who had no experience running our type of business. The new CEO started to "bring in outside people to do reviews" which was code for hire his friends to sit side-saddle with existing leadership, learn what they knew, then fire the existing staff.

      My boss, the CIO, saw what was happening and simply resigned, said he wouldn't hang around for that. He took a position with another firm fairly quickly and was up and running. After a while he started posting job openings, one of which I applied for. Note he specifically did not personally reach out and recruit anyone from the first company, just posted jobs. When I went over for an interview, he wasn't even in the office, I met with other folks.

      The CEO was livid with the CIO quitting so drummed up some BS accusation about the CIO having stolen strategic plans. The administrative staff had actually been the ones who boxed up his office and they all said that he told them specifically to leave those documents behind. Didn't matter, the CEO was an idiot.

      Anyway, during the legal wranglings, the company attorneys contacted me to ask if I had had any contact with my old boss. Not directly, but with his new company, I said. Did you interview for a job with him? I applied to a job posting and interviewed, but he was not present, I said. Did you contact him or access the job posting from company equipment? Nope.

      Then the fun part, the lawyers said "You're going to need to keep all of your personal emails and communications records you've had with him".

      I said, show me a subpoena or a court issued hold order. Otherwise I'm not doing anything and my system has scheduled cleanup processes so emails are likely to get deleted.

      Oh the uproar. They tried to bully me, threatened me, one even started saying it was illegal for me to delete those emails. I simply repeated my demand for a subpoena or a hold order from a court.

      Could they have fired me? Probably, I live in a right to work state. Could I have filed a lawsuit if they had? Probably, but likely wouldn't have.

      Eventually my old boss was able to squash the noise and I left that company for a better opportunity (not with my former CIO) not long after that anyway.

    11. Re:Wait by thomn8r · · Score: 1

      an employee grabbed a stack of confidential and top secret Itanium docs

      To be honest, if hired someone and they showed up with as much as an Itanic t-shirt, I'd probably fire them on the spot.

  2. Already throwing him under the bus by H3lldr0p · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And doing their lawyerly best to shield Uber from the worst of the storm that's brewing.

    If you go read Ars' article on the same, you'll find that the judge is having none of Uber's bullshit and is forcing them to confront the employee who has their own lawyer and is pleading the fifth about what happened to the documents in question and when.

    Uber already has enough trouble on it's plate and apparently didn't do enough due diligence when they bought this guy's company out. I'm going to guess that someone's leadership position is in severe trouble if this trial goes the wrong way for them.

    1. Re:Already throwing him under the bus by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm going to guess that someone's leadership position is in severe trouble if this trial goes the wrong way for them.

      The trial is going to go the wrong way for them. Google has several patents that Uber copied, they have trade secret laws that are in their favor, and some California competition laws that are in their favor. The evidence is heavily stacked against them at this point: they stole the LIDAR system that Google built and patented. An employee copied the LIDAR designs to a USB key, and that showed up in the logs. Besides that, witnesses heard him talking about his plans while he was still working for Google.

      The question is how badly it will go for them. If it turns out that the company knew about the stolen technology, then it's going to hurt a lot. Even if they didn't, Google might be able to completely kill Uber's self-driving car program. Most likely they are going to settle, but right now they are just discovering how bad the settlement terms will be.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Already throwing him under the bus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uber was Ubered

    3. Re:Already throwing him under the bus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Google doesn't want to kill Ubers self driving car program. They'll want something like a $1 per trip licensing fee.

  3. Cute. by SeaFox · · Score: 2

    I bet Uber thinks that since he's a former employee that automatically takes them off the hook for this whole thing.

    1. Re:Cute. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I bet Uber thinks that since he's a former employee that automatically takes them off the hook for this whole thing.

      Actually, Uber's stance is that he is an independent contractor and they have no liability for his actions. (I kid, I kid)

  4. Re: RaceRelationsDot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Finally, a place I can enjoy my Starbucks coffee at.

  5. Lyft, Waymo, etc. shouldn't even bother by ErichTheRed · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Like them or not, Uber has succeeded in their quest for ubiquitous brand recognition. They're the "Kleenex" of taxi-hailing apps. I work a lot with people who travel extensively for business, and Uber is practically a verb in their vocabularies -- "I'll just uber to the airport" They're offering new American Express cardmembers $200 in free rides just to drive everyone else out of the business, including their direct competitors and taxi companies. And, they're charging extremely low rates, offering tons of promotions, etc. Once you get big enough and are backed by enough VC money, it's pretty much over.

    Even if Uber is found to have stolen the documents, they'll just peel off a million bucks from the VC pile and move on.

    1. Re:Lyft, Waymo, etc. shouldn't even bother by nadass · · Score: 1

      As much as I would love to support your optimism, Uber has been facing so much backlash that every dollar from the VC pile is costing them 5-10 dollars of good fortune and karma points.

      Uber is quickly becoming the Twitter and Jet.com of the industry. While Jet.com burnt through low-billions yet only sold out for $3B to Walmart last year; Twitter has been burning billions of real investor cash (beyond VC) and they could not even scrape together enough pennies to make a reasonable offer for NFL streaming.

      The only real unknown is whether Uber will have 9 lives and never die (a-la AOL and Yahoo) or will they crash-and-burn in absolute glory (like Myspace).

      For a bit of nostalgia, I offer http://fuckedcompany.com/serve...

    2. Re:Lyft, Waymo, etc. shouldn't even bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      nope -

      a) Google doesn't care about money, they will not settle. They want Uber castrated so that they can never develop self-driving cars (and more importantly) that none of their investors will think they can develop self-driving cars. Uber's efforts so far have been a steaming turd, but everyone thinks Uber is on the path to success which ties in to...

      b) Uber is a freaking taxi company. Their only advantages are a) their brand and b) the promise that some day they will have a self-driving car. Their valuation makes no sense when evaluated as a taxi company.

      Once (a) happens nobody will ever give them more money at their current valuation and they will burn through the rest of their money. The business has some value but nowhere near what people have been willing to invest at. Yeah they have a long runway so they could survive in some form but...

    3. Re:Lyft, Waymo, etc. shouldn't even bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A million isn't going to be near enough.

      If it can be shown that Uber knew what they were getting when they bought Otto (and given the short acquisition period, they probably did), the $680M they paid becomes forfeit. And then there's potentially treble damages for doing it wilfully.

      Uber could be on the hook for as much as $2B.

    4. Re:Lyft, Waymo, etc. shouldn't even bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even if Uber is found to have stolen the documents, they'll just peel off a million bucks from the VC pile and move on.

      Uber is valued at upwards of 50 billion, at least at the peak of their value a few months ago. Undoubtedly, that valuation has taken a pounding since all of these allegations have come out.

      However, a company whose valuation is in the multiple billions is not going to settle a lawsuit for "a million or two" of this magnitude. It's clear that their business plan involves, longer-term, a massive fleet of self-driving Uber cars. That business plan is what's driving their ridiculous valuation. And it turns out that a lynchpin of the plan - sensor systems for autonomous vehicles - may have been stolen from Google. That means their massive valuation is largely due to *stolen technology.*

      No, you can bet that if a court finds for Google, you're looking at Uber more or less becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google, because the award will be in the tens of billions, and the entire fucking leadership team at Uber will be thrown out on their asses.

  6. Uh, what's a Waymo? by mccrew · · Score: 1

    Never heard of Waymo, why should anyone care about this?

    --
    Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
    1. Re:Uh, what's a Waymo? by sl3xd · · Score: 1

      Waymo is the Google subsidiary working on autonomous automobiles.

      And this is /., and everything Google touches is therefore newsworthy.

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    2. Re:Uh, what's a Waymo? by stephanruby · · Score: 1

      No reason. No one needs to care about this.

      It's just interesting that a former employee of Waymo (owned by Google/Alphabet) was able to quit Waymo, then build and sell his own self-driving car technology company to Uber for $680 million in no more than four months. Four months? Build and sell a company? Can you believe that?

      This guy must be a genius or something, the executives from Uber must have thought.

      But that's not the reason Waymo is suing now, apparently Waymo received a spec from a supplier "by mistake" that was supposed to go to Uber, and they saw that the self-driving car mechanism that Uber was using was identical to the mechanism that had been developed by Waymo.

    3. Re:Uh, what's a Waymo? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Custom LiDAR boards and the technology behind them are incredibly valuable right now, considering the booming interest in robotics and autonomous systems, they may be some of the most sought after tech documents for any company wanting to compete in the space. Not all LiDAR is created equal, and there is a reason Google/WayMo are trying to protect their lead (they had/have a significant lead over UBER) in the industry.

  7. Sameer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Sameer Nagana.......nagana...... nagana work here anymore!

  8. Re: RaceRelationsDot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "... at which I can enjoy my Starbucks coffee."

  9. The other unanswered question... by phorm · · Score: 1

    How did Uber gain access to an employee's personal device in order to search for this file?

    (and if they did so, how do we know they didn't plant it there to deflect blame from themselves).

    1. Re:The other unanswered question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      intimidation.

      I would love an employer to try that shit with me.

      They can't fire me over refusing, and after resisting as long as I would, they would nothing, most stuff is accessed via mounting sshfs over a remote shell server, accessed from public wifi. and on the sshfs server? everything is encrypted.

    2. Re:The other unanswered question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have no idea why slashtards assume Uber just decided to search personal devices for giggles. The obvious answer would be, because the court ordered them to. Do you really think the court is not able to order the employees to turn over personal devices for discovery?

  10. FUck that stupid brown by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Stupid fucking india brown piece of shit