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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."
Are you still bad because he won, or because he is still #winning?
Industrial espionage does not? What if it was a board or a program you had worked on and spent hours coding and engineering?
He was just trying to be that great artist jobs was always talking about. Stealing and copying is the apple motto.
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.
Apple maps on a self-driving car scare me.
Where the hell are we?
I don't know, but aren't the car's rounded edges beautiful?
"Plan for a circuit board" doesn't necessarily mean "PCB design"; it could include pretty much anything from a schematic diagram to a bill of materials to FPGA design files.
Either way, there's little point in bothering to go after this guy. As soon as Apple starts having one of their Chinese manufacturing plants fab the boards, they'll make a few extras at the end of the run and ship them to whatever Chinese self-driving car wants to steal the IP. Besides, the value is in the software anyway, not the hardware. I can't imagine Apple having any interesting hardware IP in that space. Other than miniaturization of stuff like LIDAR, and maybe specialized DSP hardware for evaluating tensor models (in which all the interesting IP is chip design, not PCB design), most of the hardware tends to be off-the-shelf.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
Actually an incident like this plays precisely into Trump's view of China. Watch his tariff program go into hyperdrive.
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.
I thought that was straight up, normal default US business practice. If it is profitable enough, they will claim national security interests and some three letter agency disappears the people who actually came up with it.
Of course routinely allowing corruption, extremely public corruption, to slide on through, is really spreading white collar crime.
Corporation espionage is really getting out of hand but that's to be expected and it is going to get worse. Corruption will feed the corporate wars and espionage is of course part of that conflict.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Corporation espionage is really getting out of hand but that's to be expected and it is going to get worse.
I haven't heard of an outright assault on an R&D facility with automatic weapons, but that supposedly happened at Seagate back in the day.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually an incident like this plays precisely into Trump's view of China. Watch his tariff program go into hyperdrive.
China is probably the only country Trump even kind of understands besides this one, because he does so much business there. As much as I personally hate the guy (and his policies on immigration, corporations, and the environment) he's not wrong about China on basically any level. The game is rigged, they do plan to run the world just like every other big nation, and tariffs (and their other business policies) are the problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Apple stole it first. US law protects their IP built from stolen shit. Get over it.
With all the shit going on in the world we have significant resources running around protecting private company IP because they failed to do it themselves. If my IP was stolen I would be laughed out of the AG office and told to pound sand on my way out.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
ROTFLMAO
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock