Former Tesla Employee Admits Uploading Autopilot Source Code To His iCloud (theverge.com) 64
Guangzhi Cao, a former engineer at Tesla that is accused of stealing company trade secrets and sending them to a Chinese startup, admitted in a court filing this week that he uploaded zip files containing Autopilot source code to his personal iCloud account in late 2018 while still working for the company. "Cao denied stealing sensitive information from the automaker in the same filing," reports The Verge. "His legal team argued he 'made extensive efforts to delete and/or remove any such Tesla files prior to his separation from Tesla.' Cao is now the 'head of perception' at XPeng, where he is '[d]eveloping and delivering autonomous driving technologies for production cars.'" From the report: According to a joint filing from the two parties that was also filed this week, Tesla has subpoenaed documents from Apple. While Apple is not involved in this case, a former employee who worked on the tech company's secretive autonomous car project was charged by the FBI with stealing trade secrets last July. That employee allegedly Air Dropped sensitive data to his wife's laptop and was also caught on CCTV leaving Apple's campus with a box of equipment. He had left his job at Apple to take a position at XPeng before being arrested. Cao was also a senior image scientist for Apple for two years before he joined Tesla, according to his LinkedIn profile.
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Disposable workforce == disposable companies == disposable customers, this is just the way of normal business. Companies have zero loyalty to staff, so staff have zero loyalty to companies. They will copy not steal, what ever they can and take it with them, that is why they were hired in the first place. Just wait till they start leaving back doors in all over the place, better to copy after you have left than before and from an off shore location. It is they way psychopaths at the top want it, PS they copy
What did he admit to? (Score:4, Informative)
Tesla claims that "Mr. Cao downloaded complete copies of Tesla’s Autopilot-related source code to his personal iCloud account" including "more than 300,000 files and directories, including the firmware, Autopilot, and neural network source code repositories."
Meanwhile, Mr. Cao claims, "Prior to his departure from Tesla, Cao diligently and earnestly attempted to remove any and all Tesla intellectual property and source code from his own personal devices. (It was a practice regularly followed by Tesla engineers and routinely condoned by its management for employees to place work-related information, including sensitive or confidential information, on their own personal devices.) To the extent that any source code or other confidential information remained on Cao’s devices subsequent to his departure, it was only as a result of inadvertence."
So, what Mr. Cao has admitted to is downloading code to his personal devices but claims that he attempted to delete all such code before quitting Tesla. Mr. Cao further claims that Tesla implicitly allowed storing code on personal devices, although he didn't address whether he download as much code or whether he uploaded to his iCloud account as Tesla claimed.
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Thank you, it's interesting how the allegations and accusations of companies are taken as gospel. They can allege all sorts of things in a lawsuit, doesn't mean any of it is actually true, whether or not it appears that "it might be true" to a third party. Don't have the details to make any sort of informed judgement, but "but it's Tesla" is not automatically compelling evidence.
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The simple facts of the matter are that XPeng somehow ended up with Autopilot. I mean, they didn't even try to disguise it - even the GUI is exactly the same. This sort of theft is a problem in all industries, and needs to be remedied.
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Blatant IP theft like that is condoned and encouraged by Chinese government.
Because China pays well for that kind of information. If you live in a society where bottom line is the most important thing, it shouldn't come as a surprise that others will consider their bottom line as more important than their employer's bottom line. So I'm willing to hear anyone's solution to pure greed because when that dollar figure hits a high enough number, there's got to be something outside that bottom line that kicks in to stop that theft.
I'm not saying that greed is the only thing that drives
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Those two things are not contradictory, are they? Can't you upload things to iCloud and not have them on your iDevice?
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Those two things are not contradictory, are they? Can't you upload things to iCloud and not have them on your iDevice?
I would imagine there will be a fair bit of discussion as to whether iCloud is considered a "personal device" in the various context bandied about. How easy is it to put files on an iDevice if you're not plugging it into a PC for instance - is iCloud on a PC a suitable way of transferring data to a personal device?
Will be interesting if they go down this path.
Thieves. (Score:2, Interesting)
The usual way a start-up in some countries operate.
Don't forget (Score:2)
all Chinese businesses of any size are controlled by the state. You can't operate without them. I'm wondering about espionage and how useful this might be to the PLA...
Anyone remember the founding of Fairchild & In (Score:1)
And the “Traitorous Eight” with Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
You think Gordon Moore left Shockley Semiconductor and later Fairchild Semiconductor without at least a few files?
There was litigation over that which lasted years.
These days the encuments are using the FBI to enforce their dominance.
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This happened a lot in Silicon Valley in the early days. Intel was started by ex-Fairchild people. The 6502 only exists because Motorola employees were upset that the bosses didn't want to make a low cost 6800.
Of course, they all took their knowledge with them. Okay, not stealing the documents, but the ex-Motorola people made a literal exact clone of the 6800 that cost a fraction as much.
That's one reason why non-compete agreements are a thing.
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I see plots within plots. (Score:3)
According to all the incredibly smart and sober figures here at /. the Tesla Autopilot is less than commercially worthless (in other words a liability) so maybe Cao is doing them a favor by sabotaging the competition.
Don’t worry (Score:2)
I’m sure the Chinese government will immediately clamp down on a company which practiced such an egregious form of intellectual property theft.
Re: Don't hire Chinks (Score:1)
Yes... just like segregation and slavery... don't we just love our good old racism...
Pirated Code (Score:2)
It was just resting there (Score:1)
An Insightful Comparison (Score:1)
Being Chinese and working in a software development/engineer role in 2019 is like being an Arabic person on a plane shortly after 9/11.