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Tesla Sues Former Employees For Allegedly Stealing Data, Autopilot Source Code (reuters.com)
Tesla is suing a former engineer at the company, claiming he copied the source code for its Autopilot technology before joining a Chinese self-driving car startup in January. Reuters reports: The engineer, Guangzhi Cao, copied more than 300,000 files related to Autopilot source code as he prepared to join China's Xiaopeng Motors Technology Company Ltd, the Silicon Valley carmaker said in the lawsuit filed in a California court. Separately, Tesla lawyers on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against four former employees and U.S. self-driving car startup Zoox Inc, alleging the employees stole proprietary information and trade secrets for developing warehousing, logistics and inventory control operations. The Verge reported on the lawsuit filed against Cao: Tesla says that last year, Cao started uploading "complete copies of Tesla's Autopilot-related source code" to his iCloud account. The company claims he ultimately moved more than 300,000 files and directories related to Autopilot. After accepting a job with XPeng at the end of last year, Tesla says Cao deleted 120,000 files off his work computer and disconnected his personal iCloud account, and then "repeatedly logged into Tesla's secure networks" to clear his browser history before his last day with the company. Tesla also claims Cao recruited another Autopilot employee to XPeng in February. Tesla claims that it gives XPeng "unfettered access" to Autopilot: "Absent immediate relief, Tesla believes Cao and his new employer, [XPeng], will continue to have unfettered access to Tesla's marquee technology, the product of more than five years' work and over hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, which they have no legal right to possess," the company's lawyers write.
Wiping your browser history and personal stuff is pretty standard before leaving a company, hardly suspicious.
If he did steal their tech then you have to wonder if it's worth it. They are years behind in this area, rolling back their promises and no longer talking about a timeline for it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm shocked. SHOCKED! Well, not that shocked.
Is this you or just a friend of yours? I would guess so.
Just like you to either troll, lie, cheat, or steal.
What did Tesla expect would happen ?
They hired a Chinese man, and the guy acted like all Chinese do. They steal and copy from US firms with no qualms whatsoever.
They are theives.
He could have simply been taking his work home with him... could have. That he could do such a thing shows their poor security and ability to protect their own supposed trade secrets. He did it for over a year and not just before he left the company. He could have understood it was "officially" forbidden but in practice it was not enforced which is proven by how he did it for over a year before he left the company. Theoretically he could have simply been covering up frowned upon ways he cut corners that he used in order to perform in his job better. Not sure I believe it but it is easily plausible. Based on this he shouldn't be sued now.
As far as the company that hired him... I wouldn't want to touch him if I intended to ever sell my cars in the western society; since it should be trivial to compel the company into an independent code review. Either for direct copyright infringement or code or against patents.
P.S. On a tangent... I think all software sold in all markets for all commercial products should have it's source code be forced to be confidentially registered. Makes it easier to catch cheaters. So companies can't go out of business or claim a fire ate their homework. Would also make it easier to do automated code comparisons.
I wouldn't be too worried about this "theft." That source code is a huge trojan horse anyway, if I ever seen one. How many times has Tesla autopilot caused crashes, deaths, and mayhem so far?
If China wants to bring Skynet Terminator robots running loose in their country without updates, bug fixes, and support from the original developers, they are going to reap all that is coming to them. Good luck, have fun!
Plenty of companies create EVs. Problem is, that everybody wants to buy a superior vehicle that is also a superior value. And that is Tesla. It is not the crap that others like you seem to push.
Alternatively, we could view this as yet another example of the "false protest" as USA gives China a leg up to help equalize the world. For instance, the only reason that China is a dominant force in manufacturing for USA is that USA wrongly classifies Thorium as a nuclear source material (you can't make a bomb out of Thorium, not even a dirty one, it's not very radioactive when dispersed). Thorium is found as in all rare earth mineral depositis, such as neodymium and dysprosium. Rare earth minerals are essential for making all "high tech" stuff, everything from smartphone glass to vehicle alternators. But in the USA the Thorium Regulations cause our rare earth mining operations to be very expensive. Meanwhile China leaves giant piles of Thorium just laying around (it's heavy, won't wash away, doesn't pollute... doesn't bind to organic chemistry so pollution yields little to no absorption into ecosystem).
So, there's no real reason not to leave it laying around, but in USA it has to be separated carefully and then stowed back underground in the mine... Manufacturing moves near source material. It would be trivial for USA to deregulate Thorium (at least remove it from nuclear source material classification), and in one fell swoop this would bring rare earth mining competition to China (which now has a near defacto monopoly on rare earths). That single executive order would "Make America Great Again" (at manufacturing), if that were really Trump's goal... but politics is a game to distract fools from how the world really works.
In the 1960's Thorium Reactors were invented in the USA ostensibly to create a power supply for large planes to fly non-stop. Nixon was told to back Uranium fuel because it yields Plutonium needed for "nuclear weapons", instead of the much safer Thorium Reactor... Now China is being allowed to develop Thorium Energy reactors ahead of USA. This is all by design, folks. The "we're actually enemies" shtick is just to quell the restless locals who would object to USA deliberately allowing China to beat USA both in terms of manufacturing and new energy technology (this is the real reason the energy sector is languishing). The aim these past decades has been to bring China out of 2nd world and solidify China as a 1st world nation. This is true "globalism" - i.e., hold some nations back so that the others can prosper.
In a similar vein, USA gifted VHS to Japan then made it the standard as one of the many efforts to (re)build Japan's post-war economy.
The real lever of power is the distribution and release of technological progress. There is more technology developed in secret and waiting in the wings, such as Thorium Reactors or other sources of energy (Tesla was correct when he said we were just swimming in a sea of electricity -- his towers did not pump electricity to the world, Tesla's Towers just harnessed the electrical potential that exists in thin upper airs). So, color me nonplussed if yet another innovation has essentially been gifted to China while we ineffectually kvetch about it via useless court room antics. We're doing this shit on purpose. Wake me when they're a competitor for something important, like Atmospheric Energy Collection.
Who let the retards out?
They could not do a simple thing like get me a date, then they charged me for an extra month. No way am I gonna let them drive my car.
I think it is kind of amusing to imagine a future where cars are controlled by desktop applications. Especially an app that runs on a proprietary system like Windows or macOS. Things are going smoothly, you are traveling down the highway at 65 mph when suddenly: "There is a software update, please click OK to continue."
Oh, but surely the application designers would turn off that feature, right? Or they might use something open source like Linux, but then they might not get the proper hardware drivers that they need to operate the camera system, or the video cards. Speaking of which, are they using commodity hardware for these cars? At some point they will need to lock in the hardware configuration, if the system is using object recognition it had better have some well tested performance before anyone should let it drive half a ton of metal down a busy street. There can't be any of this: "The car crashed because there was a defective video card."
So what, exactly, are those fools at Uber and Google and Zoox doing with these self-driving projects? It all seems like a joke, because if they were anywhere close to a working technology then there would be secondary ripples in the technology market, there would be a boost for hardware manufacturers offering the most reliable products. Are we really supposed to believe that the first generation of true self-driving cars will be controlled by desktop computers with USB cameras and sensors?
... if your intellectual property is worthless.
Duh. Do you ever expect an amoral communist to care about ethics or obeying OUR laws? The only law that a Chinese person follows is to be loyal to the party. I guess that this generation is to blinded by dancing, singing, drugs, and 'reality shows' to have learned ANYTHING about Communism.
Noooo. Yes? Whodathunk!
Now Chinese cars can drive you into barriers and the back of fire trucks. At least this one found the hole: https://www.zerohedge.com/news...
just post the code, open source it -- come on Elon.. be more open about it.. think about the safety benefits you can gain from the whole world knowing how it works... you can be like the movies;; Hackers (Fisher Stevens as Eugene), Antitrust (Tim Robbins as Winston)...
REMOVE CHOPSTICK.
The faux self driving badly named auto pilot stuff is lane assist and variable cruise control. CC is hardly advanced science. Tesla lane assist has resulted in several deaths.
If they stole this tech they got nothing worth having. It is usually better to write your own than try to fix someone elses known fucked up code. If it was easy to fix then Tesla already would have.
This is a faux news story posted because /. as revenue is missing target for the month and they only have a week left to catch up. Expect more zero value click bait until end of the month.
Because their corporate secrets are written in English?
You sir are taking out of your bum.
There are no thorium reactors, buddy. They are the same uranium reactors, except that the uranium is produced by worsening the neutron economy so that the thorium is transmuted into uranium by a part of the neutron flux. The produced uranium then burns.
It is an awful idea, because you get a lot more radioactive waste than in the usual reactors, and the produced isotopes are the same as those coming out of a "normal", uranium reactor. It is also less efficient, more complex and what not.
And it is only a concept, and not a "technology".
Except among the less literate, who aggregate on /.
Citizenship status is not a protected class. It can be a BFOQ (Bona Fide Occupational Qualification) - the notable example would be if you're hiring someone to work with export controlled information (ITAR, in particular). It is perfectly legal to have a hiring requirement of "US Person Only" or "US Citizen Only" (the former includes legal permanent residents, aka Green Card holders).
national origin most certainly is something on which you cannot discriminate - it's not a "protected class" per se (like "female")
It is an awful idea, because you get a lot more radioactive waste than in the usual reactors
That's an interesting claim. Everything I've read says the opposite; that they produce far less waste. I don't suppose you have any citations.
for the crime of being stupid scummy sellouts. No jury should encourage this level of foolish-on-steroids in corporate America by finding in favor of Tesla - any society gets more of whatever it rewards, and sees less of what ir punishes.
They hire a Chinese engineer, almost certainly in place of an American engineer, and give him access to all their stuff - and then they are SHOCKED that he steals it and plans to go live well off the ill-gotten gains back home in China?
Nobody is that stupid legitimately; you really have to put your greed into overdrive, flush your patriotism down the toilet, and probably smoke enough weed to reduce your IQ down into the mid 50s.
If a company's budget and effort on maintaining the security for a claimed "millions of dollars" of intellectual property is practically zero or otherwise worthless, because they do nothing to keep this all stored with appropriate security, then isn't whining about it after it gets taken a bit like storing all your money on the ground in front of your house, and then getting all butt-hurt when someone comes along and takes it?
This seems more like a cheap way to modern forced indenture to keep wages of key employees down, by accusing anyone who takes their knowledge gained "on the job" and leaves for another company that then competes with them, and steals their talent.
China brings ideas to market very quickly.
People were tired of waiting 20 years while the suits fight each other and try to wait out the inventors.
Now the tech comes in 5 years or less.
And thorium can be transmuted to fissile material.
Japan's bomb project was based on this.
That's why it's controlled.
According to wikipedia there have been thorium based reactors. It is indeed a reactor type that uses Thorium (and neutrons) to produce uranium. The development took place at the beginning of nuclear era and another path was then taken. There are some experimental projects going on in India I think. I am not a big fun of nuclear for number of practical and moral (*) reasons but the way things go in our hyperhysteric societies in the West with Holy Greta and other signs of the Armageddon coming etc we will have to produce base load with something.
* - The plumbers and financial gurus should insure their business then I have no problem. As it is currently, if things go bad we all pay and said plumbers and financial gurus go away without liability. These are moral grounds I have. Practical issues I have with it could be possibly overcome but nobody gives a damn anyway.
So how about those H1B employees!! Yay!!!
The Chinese government has a list of technologies it wants to acquire. They send PHD students to universities and engineers to companies with the sole purpose of stealing. Classic example of China's economic war with the West and Japan is how they cornered the rare earth metals market and then used it as a weapon.
that stinky chinky, why do all chinese smell like shit and why can't they actually invent anything unique?
those stinky chinkys are only capable of stealing shit, just like mexicans.
stupid chinese chinks - the mexicans of the east. You ugly wide faced thieving chinese cucks.