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Ex-Googler Levandowski gets 18 months in prison for trade-secret theft:
Ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski yesterday was sentenced to 18 months in prison following his March guilty plea for stealing a confidential document related to Google's self-driving technology.
Levandowski's lawyers last week asked a judge in US District Court for the Northern District of California to let him off without any prison time, arguing that a year of home confinement, a fine, restitution, and community service would be sufficient punishment. The federal government asked for a 27-month prison sentence.
While handing down the 18-month sentence, US District Judge William Alsup said that a sentence without imprisonment would give "a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets," according to a Reuters report. Levandowski was originally charged with 33 counts of stealing trade secrets by downloading thousands of documents to his personal laptop in December 2015 shortly before he left Google to work on his startup, Otto, which was acquired by Uber for a reported $680 million in August 2016. In a plea deal, Levandowksi admitted to stealing one document called "Chauffeur TL weekly updates," which tracked the progress of Google's "Project Chauffeur" that later became Waymo. Prosecutors dropped the other charges.
Levandowski won't have to serve the sentence right away, as Alsup ruled that he can go to prison after the coronavirus pandemic subsides, according to Reuters and other news outlets.
Levandowski also must pay $756K to Waymo
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday August 06 2020, @05:12PM (7 children)
Ha-HA! What a hecking snitcheroonie!
But you're also right, which is why any person worth their salt would be slick enough to not only change the code but commit in increments to look convincing. Reword or add/remove comments as needed. Change variable and method names, expand or contract logic by using standard libraries or reinventing the wheel, change the order in which method definitions are written, maybe use bitwise stuff instead of integers and arithmetic operators. Break classes and methods up into sub components and consolidate others.
College papers and drug tests are the same way. They're not there to discourage cheating, they're there to filter out the dumb cheaters from the smart ones. In the age of TurnItIn you'd have to be an absolute fool to just hand in a paper somebody else wrote. But if you have raw material for a paper than you can be prepared for a good grade in hours rather than days or weeks. Change the title and section names, obviously, then scan though the paper and re-write all parts to your style (using a thesaurus to substitute bigger words), rearrange the order of sections if possible. Substitute a few of the sources using the free book previews found online for related books.
Cheating is an art, and the stakes are pretty high for people who are sloppy at it. Look at all these "big-name" journalists who are getting caught for line-by-line copying of others' work.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 06 2020, @05:43PM (6 children)
Unless they weren't the ones who wrote it in the first place, in which case you don't want them around. You won't be happy when they plagiarize your crap to get ahead.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday August 06 2020, @06:30PM (5 children)
So with that statement are you admitting that Indian and Chinese code workforces are a bad thing? Because what you just described is everything they can't do. Hell, their code won't even compile.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 06 2020, @06:51PM (4 children)
Same with China.
Same with Russia
Same with Eastern Europe.
I've never said otherwise. And nowadays we're either going to bring back more manufacturing from China or else. Many of us are ready to pay more for stuff not made in China where there's a choice. Problem is that in many cases there IS no choice. Walmart is the biggest offender/enabler, but most tech companies are guilty.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @07:35PM (1 child)
I try not to shop much at Walmart, but last time I was there I found they have a decent set of bath towels made in the USA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @04:18AM
Those towels may be labeled "made in USA", but with WalMart's history, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the only thing done in USA was sewing on the labels... Just say'n.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @05:48AM (1 child)
This is pretty much all there is to know all about know-it-alls like you who don't know shit but feed off of each other's ignorance on this website. Seriously, why did you use Mumbai? It is neither capital of India nor software hub. It has a stock exchange... But that is not related to the story at hand.
And then you talk about Indian judicial system in the same breadth as China, then Russia and then Eastern Europe. Are you certified retard? My god how do you conduct yourself day to day with this much ignorance? That's privilege you know, that you aren't being taken advantage of every second of your life.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday August 07 2020, @12:05PM
Want to go to court? Be ready for a 15-year delay before you get a judgment. And that's a big problem for companies that outsource to shitholes with a broken legal system - effectively no legal recourse when they incorporate your stuff into competing products.
Then there's China. Massive counterfeiting operations run by the same plants that are making your product under contract, so they become your biggest competitor, and you're paying them for that "privilege ". And subsidizing their Muslim prison camps. A million prisoners. Funded with exports.
But back to India - 600,000,000 people without an indoor toilet. You could literally stand them in line and they'd reach to the moon - and this was before social distancing and the pandemic. And it will never be fixed because the tax base isn't there to pay for it, because everyone dodges taxes. Their choice, but they have to live with the consequences, including infrastructure that fails every year when the rains come.
Way back when, a local company had designed a working ultra cheap Linux tablet for the masses, tried to get it manufactured in India, got fed up after 2 years of constant demands for bribes at all levels, and abandoned the project. That's typical. Wonder how Apple is going to do, having moved IPhone production there. Maybe they have enough clout to actually get things working normally, but it's still going to be a problem for everyone who has to deal with a country where the legal system is broken. Like Russia. Like China.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.