Slashdot Mirror
Ex-Apple Worker Charged With Stealing Self-Driving Car Trade Secrets (reuters.com)
U.S. authorities on Monday charged a former Apple employee with theft of trade secrets, alleging that the person downloaded a secret blueprint related to a self-driving car to a personal laptop and later trying to flee the country, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court. From a report: The complaint said that the former employee, Xiaolang Zhang, disclosed intentions to work for a Chinese self-driving car startup and booked a last-minute flight to China after downloading the plan for a circuit board for the self-driving car. Authorities arrested Zhang on July 7 at the San Jose airport after he passed through a security checkpoint. "Apple takes confidentiality and the protection of our intellectual property very seriously," Apple said in a statement. "We're working with authorities on this matter and will do everything possible to make sure this individual and any other individuals involved are held accountable for their actions."
Most other things though are looking good. That punk ass traitor will die in Federal prison and never make it to his multiple state sentences.
The Apple Police scare me.
Hello Slashdot,
Recently I've had a chance to do some web design with PHP. Previously I'd used Perl because I'd heard from many people that Perl was the end all and be all of scripting languages for the web. Imagine my suprise
to discover that PHP was vastly superior! I know this is a bold statement, but I have solid arguements to support it.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of the shortcomings I've had with Perl. Here are a few of the things I've noticed about PHP. Finally, I'm not the most talented Perl programmer out there. I generally prefer to use the vastly superior Python, but can use Perl if I have to.
* Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl
took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
* The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk. We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
* Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl though.
* Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's
strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP, but I can't think of any at the moment.
* Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires
that much rewriting.
* Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice) its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library
of any kind.
* Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data
structures.
Again this is just my experience. I don't mean to offend any Perl coders because Perl was an excellent language. However, in certain cases it may behoove one to write the back end in PHP instead of Perl.
Thank you for your time,
Egg Troll
For safety's sake.
Winnie not only endorses stealing honey, but trade secrets too. Time to vote with my wallet and buy as little as possible from China.
I'll take "things Trump hasn't done" for $500, Alex
They will get the truth out of you one way or another they have ways to make you talk...
1) give them an iPhone and tell them they are not tracking it.. you know they tell the truth so you can trust them...
2) make you watch endless Steve jobs keynote speeches...
it is morally wrong to call on the violence of the state to attack someone for sharing.
Thanks Obama!
He was just trying to be that great artist jobs was always talking about. Stealing and copying is the apple motto.
I'll take "things Trump hasn't done" for $500, Alex
The answer is: "The Wall" and "Lock her up"
He was just trying to pull a Levandowski. All he has to do now is found a new self-driving car company. in China.
Or maybe this act was done on Levandowski's behalf....
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Claerly
It all sounds very convincing ... but the fact that the evidence which directly lead to his arrest was a PCB design makes me just a bit suspicious. We're a couple decades removed from the point where a PCB design had any chance of showing important IP.
Stealing technologies and pretend it's theirs.
I'm more impressed that the file access audit flagged an alarm that resulted in a manhunt! Damn!!!
Now only if Experian had such a scheme in place to nail the hacker/s
If there is anything I hate more than Apple Fanbois...It's Fucking Butthurt Historic Apple Fanbois who still worship the Apple II today.
Fuck Woz and fuck Woz worshippers. For goodness sake it's like people still talking about Microsoft stealing from Apple in its early days.... it's irrelevant now you fucking dinosaurs.... time to move on.
Wondering what the legal justification is of arresting someone at an airport based on statements from an employer. Doesn't seem to meet the grounds for felony IP infringement as that requires distribution (which wasn't mentioned or proved-- besides if he distributed it electronically he wouldn't need the laptop).
He copied something illegally. Courts seemingly are required to prove it's a felony.
Must be nice to be so rich and powerful in a city you can just call the cops to do what you want.
A Chinese worker turns out to be a technology-spy.
I'm shocked!
What if it was a board or a program Xiaolang Zhang had worked on and spent hours coding and engineering?
It wasn't his. He was an employee. There's a tradeoff. You get a paycheck regardless of whether your work/project turns out to be commercially successful, you are not at risk, but you retain no ownership of your work.
You want to share in the upside? Go work for a startup, invest your life savings, invest the money of family and friends. Be at risk. Then you get ownership and the bounty if successful.
If he distributed it electronically he might not get paid. After all, he is a thief, why would the new venture want him around? Better to steal from the thief and be done with him. Also no paper trail, or blockchain trail, of payment to him so there is some plausible deniability that the new venture was behind it, just a rouge working speculatively on his own..
So, two of his less important promises.
I thought they gave up on the self-driving-car stuff. Any IP they have would be third tier at best.
A chink in the armor