Autopilot engineer drove off to Chinese rival with our top-secret blueprints in the glovebox, Tesla claims in sueball Tesla today sued ex-employee Guangzhi Cao for allegedly stealing the source code for the leccy car maker's Autopilot software. The lawsuit, filed in a US federal district court in Silicon Valley, claims Cao began looking for a new job in November 2018, and received a verbal offer from China-based "Tesla imitator" Xiaopeng …
Issue here is that SpaceX stuff stolen by Blue Origin is a one naughty engineer furthering his career but a single engineer stealing stuff from a US company and giving it to a Chinese company was state sponsored IP theft ... apparently ... The US authorities obviously have loads of solid proof of this, just like they have for the Huawei case ...
This post has been deleted by its author
"Because its there"
The superior Bzip2 has been there for couple decades already, producing significantly smaller archives, with minimal system resources. LZMA is even better though much slower. Then again I'm still working a lot with remote offices with 2/1Mb DSL lines and the much smaller packages offset the slower archiving.
My colleague always used the old compress util until he retired couple years ago. Never wanted to use even gzip.
Generally every *NIX system for the last few decades will support gzip, so it is a natural choice if you don't want to be bothered checking the man page for 'tar' on that system to see what it supports.
It also depends on what matters most - if speed of compression is more important than code size then using a parallel gzip utility like 'pigz' is worth considering. Decompressing it makes not much difference though.
$ tar --use-compress-program=pigz -cf autopilot.tgz autopilot/
What with the perceived "success" of the Autopilot, it's numerous fatal and severe accidents ( admittedly a tiny percentage of use) and misconception that it's a complete self driving tool, perhaps he should have removed all software and working copies?
Interesting how the surnames of those involved have a common look to them too. Or is it the forename?
Given Tesla Autopilot's propensity for driving into large, stationary, objects -- trucks, bridge abutments, emergency vehicles -- at full speed, why would anyone WANT to steal the underlying technology? Seems to me that if I were running a company developing its own lane keeping/collision avoidance technology, I'd prefer to steal IP from some company whose technology works.
Stealing the technology behind Tesla Autopilot seems to me to be much like stealing Microsoft's Quality Assurance technology. I suppose one could do it. ... But why?
"China remains the world’s principal IP infringer, driven by an industrial policy that continues to prioritize both acquisition and development of science and technology."
The only IP China recognizes is Chinese and thus only citizens can file and own IP in China. Same for copyright. Stealing from any other country isn't a crime in China and so they just shrug it off and carry on. With this type of theft, once the info/data is in China, it's unrecoverable and can be used by any Chinese company for a slight fee to the "owner".
Isn't that pretty much true for most law? Otherwise you could be prosecuted for a crime committed in one country by any and all other countries assuming that they don't recognise problems with double-jeopardy outside their jurisdiction?
In terms of IP, trademarks are generally only recognised within a specific country's jurisdiction.
Actually France has a law where they are allowed charge people that murder their citizens abroad, regardless of the jurisdiction.
Actually, while trying to find the name, I found it isnt murder, it is any crime!
"Under France's Napoleonic Code, prosecutions can be taken against individuals who are not within the French jurisdiction and for alleged offences which occurred overseas."
This will be on the list of topics covered at the forthcoming El-Reg Lecture on Self Driving?
I am very sceptical about it and a lot of the things that so many Tesladroids (mostly from California AFAIK) want like sleeping during their commute and earning 'loadsamoney' from their car while they are at work with car sharing...
Should be a good session.
The complaint contends Cao received a written job offer from XMotors on December 12, and thereafter deleted 120,000 files from his iCloud and disconnected the cloud storage service from his Tesla-issued computer on December 26. And in the days leading up to his departure, it's claimed, Cao logged onto Tesla's secure network repeatedly, and then cleared his browser history before he left.
At my previous employers, deleting browser history, cookies, passwords, any private information from my employer's systems was SOP.
That he deleted the 120,000 files before disconnecting his iCloud account sounds like the opposite of stealing the source code... :-S
Of course, he might have copied them locally onto his home machine or a USB stick and passed them on, but the evidence provided makes him sound like a conciscious employee making sure he didn't take anything with him.
The creating of a Zip file is suspicious and doesn't bode well for him, but the first part looks to contradict the claims.
From an evidence point of view, it sounds like Cao can rebuke the accusations by saying he was clearing out his private accounts of any company data before leaving the company. The Zip file is more difficult, but not impossible to rebuke.
The bigger question is, why was his private iCloud account even allowed to be connected to company equipment? We have nothing like the trade secrets of Tesla, but no company data can be stored on non-company equipment and no private data, storage medium, hardware or services are allowed to be stored or attached to company equipment.
We aren't even allowed email on private smartphones, only company smartphones and they are locked down, you can't put any other apps than those authorized on the device and you are prohibited from installing non-company email or cloud services on the 'phone.
I'm pretty sure that you are not understanding the sequence.
The files were moved to the private iCloud account, compressed and stored elsewhere, then deleted from the iCloud account. Presumably this made them easier to archive, or copy, or he thought that it was less likely to be detected.
I'm very sympathetic to keeping a reference copy of things that you have worked on. But when you are copying the entire system, especially after forming an intent to work for a competitor, you are far over the line into theft.
The story disconnects the zipping up and copying of the files from the deletion on iCloud. The story makes it sound like he deleted the files first and then, later copied them from the network directly.
I agree withz you about copying the entire system - whether going to a competitor or not.
Back in pre-retirement days when I had to pretend to work for a living, I did a wide variety of things. That included participation in a couple of attempts to transfer technology between players -- one of which knew how to do something and another of which wanted to learn how to do it. Turns out that transferring IP is not easy at all. It's damn difficult in fact. Attempts probably fail more often than they succeed. And that's with everyone trying to make the transfer work.
My opinion is that the insistent bleating of "They stole our technology" doesn't come from people who actually do things. Those who do things are presumably too busy doing stuff to worry about IP theft. I think it comes from those who have lost or are losing a technology race and feel a need to transfer explain how and why their efforts didn't succeed.
I think there's a long story there. As I understand it, Tesla Motors once had an alliance with an Israeli Company called Mobileye which was and maybe still is a leader in collision avoidance technology. Mobileye will retrofit a Collision Avoidance kit to your older car for rather a lot of money if you so desire. A few years ago TM had falling out with Mobileye. The details of the dustup weren't made public so far as I know. So Tesla has gone forward with its own (similar?) technology. Mobileye was bought out by Intel in 2017 for rather a lot of billions of dollars.
I have no idea how well Mobileye's technology actually works or whether they were responsible for some of Tesla's problems.
I have a different perspective on the situation.
Mobileye started as a graduate project in image recognition. It transformed into a company with a product that recognized road signs. They added the ability to recognize lane markers, including upcoming curves, along with a limited static recognition of some objects (vehicles, cycles, and pedestrians).
Mobileye's (and Tesla's) current system does more, but Telsa started out years ago with a very basic product. Basically the Mobileye camera system output (at low speed) a list of road signs, the distance to the next lane curve, how much of a curve that was, and if there was a recognized object in the path. Tesla took that output, combined it with other sensors, and built what is best described as a lane-keeping system for use only on already-scanned sections of highway.
If you look at the documented Tesla accidents, you can readily see the limitations of the older approach. Tesla and Mobileye were separating before the Florida accident, but that accident made it clear that the Mobileye approach was flawed. Their static image system lost track that a truck was crossing the path. It presumably "saw" the truck initially crossing, but when the plain white trailer spanned the highway, it reported only an unobstructed lane markers to the no-feature horizon.
(There are additional faults, such as relying on radar which scanned under the trailer, but that's beyond the scope here.)
Most large, rapidly-evolving systems are mind-numbingly complex to build properly, and almost impossible to branch development of.
But being of limited direct use doesn't mean that it wasn't stolen. Saying "can't be worth stealing" is dismissive of a crime.
And there are many situations where it's a huge advantage to know one way of making something work
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
