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Uber Finds One Allegedly Stolen Waymo File -- On An Employee's Personal Device (techcrunch.com)
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."
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.
I bet Uber thinks that since he's a former employee that automatically takes them off the hook for this whole thing.
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.
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.
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.
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
No, they searched the machines of the employees named. Presumably with their permission, since one of them -- Levandowski -- didn't co-operate.
Sameer Nagana.......nagana...... nagana work here anymore!
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
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).
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.