6 ms·

Offhand, this kind of sounds like a parent asking their teenager to go and search their own room for drugs. "Nah, I didn't find anything. I found this plastic

by YCode 9y ago

Offhand, this kind of sounds like a parent asking their teenager to go and search their own room for drugs. "Nah, I didn't find anything. I found this plastic bag that looks like it mighta had something in it, but I'm pretty sure my friend left it here and it was empty when he brought it." "Okay son, go search again."

huangc10 9y ago
I have to...completely agree with you on your analogy. You forgot to mention the part about the urine sample.
oh_sigh 9y ago
Also, there is no reason to believe that a bad actor would steal 14,000 documents from a previous company, and then on the first day on the job go and upload them to the company git server. If I knew I was being nefarious, I would keep those documents on a completely airgapped computer in a private (non-company) space, only reference them when I was alone, and then bring information into the company only through my brain(and probably, with a reasonable parallel reconstruction already determined).
- ergothus 9y ago
  I don't disagree with your assessment in general, the problem is that when you take the set of "criminals", and then further drill in to "criminals that actually get accused", you rapidly change the ratio of "clever" to "think-they-are-clever". I'm not saying all criminals are stupid [Edit: stupid, careless, ignorant, poor at prediction, poor at risk calculation, take your pick] ...just that many are. And the really clever ones are often able to do it without even getting accused. So you're left with a group that has a LOT of facepalm-inducing members. And sad to say, even filtering the list for people in high ranking positions doesn't help that much. Apparently "actually be a clever criminal" and "be a successful business person" don't overlap a lot. (I imagine "ABLE to be a clever criminal" has more overlap...but most decide not to.) Side story: When I was a young kid (8?) my mom sternly told me "I don't EVER want to hear of you...committing a crime you can't retire on". Oddly enough, that was far more valuable than just saying "don't commit a crime". It had a logic my young brain could understand more easily than base morals or even evaluating the odds of getting caught. It inured me to a fair amount of peer pressure until I was old enough to decide for myself (and kids have few opportunities to commit huge crimes). Each kid is different, of course, but I recommend this to all parents of young children.
  - kmonsen 9y ago
    I think you should change stupid with careless, or calculated risk or something like that.
    - __jal 9y ago
      I think we need less auditing of other people's word choice, to be honest. /meta
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    This isn't about criminals exactly. It's about an engineer thinking "My future job is going to be a huge pain without access to the shared drive that has all our notes and matlab scripts and research papers. Maybe I'll just make a copy and keep it for occasional reference in case I need to look something up.".
    - matt4077 9y ago
      "Also I'll set up a company through a straw man and convince my employer to buy it for a few hundred million, in case I ever need a few hundred million. Then, I'll abscond with those documents and few select google employees and start my own thing. With matlab and LIDARS! Which reminds me: I should really take a long walk with this Travis guy. Maybe he has a need for 'occasional reference'".
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    I don't disagree, but my point is this: Finding these files on Uber servers certainly is, if not proof of guilt, at least very damning. However, lack of files on Uber servers isn't proof of innocence.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - munificent 9y ago
    > I'm not saying all criminals are stupid [Edit: stupid, careless, ignorant, poor at prediction, poor at risk calculation, take your pick] ...just that many are. And the really clever ones are often able to do it without even getting accused. So you're left with a group that has a LOT of facepalm-inducing members. Right, it's a classic example of survivorship bias.
- Twirrim 9y ago
  If you look at the evidence Google presented, I'm really not convinced he thought things through at all. For someone seemingly trying to do something illegal, he's been curiously inept: > Summer 2015 - Anthony Levandowski told Pierre-Yves Droz, a colleague at Waymo, that he had talked with an Uber executive about forming a self-driving car startup and that Uber would be interested in buying that startup. .. whole bunch of stuff around retrieving the design data from Waymo/Google ... > January 5, 2016 - Levandowski took a walk with Droz. In Pierre-Yves’ deposition, he claims that Levandowski “told him that he planned to ‘replicate’ Waymo’s technology at a new company he was forming.” (Droz 27) .. another bit of downloading .. > January 14, 2016 - Levandowski was seen meeting at Uber’s headquarters and the news travelled back to Droz. Droz asked Levandowski about this, and he admitted he had met with Uber and was looking for investors for his new company. (Droz 29, Filing 48) > January 15, 2016 - Levandowski officially forms 280 Systems (in stealth mode). Note that this was one day after his meeting with Uber. (Filing 49) > January 27, 2016 - Levandowski resigns from Waymo without notice. (Filing 49) > February 1, 2016 - Levandowski forms Otto Trucking (this is also in stealth mode). (Filing 49)
handedness 9y ago
Which is so absurd on the face of it that it almost certainly can't be what's happening here. Having had an inside view into several situations which received public coverage, it's clear to me that the old adage of, “a man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one,” applies not just to people, but to the entities they wield.
ekidd 9y ago
> Offhand, this kind of sounds like a parent asking their teenager to go and search their own room for drugs. I have expressed this attitude to corporate lawyers before, and asked them how the system deals with bad actors. Basically, if a judge catches you lying during discovery, they can issue a default judgement against you and impose very serious additional damages. For example: http://newenglandinhouse.com/2015/06/09/default-judgment-affirmed-based-on-discovery-violations/ http://newenglandinhouse.com/2015/06/09/default-judgment-aff... Furthermore, the lawyers in question can be disbarred: https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/litigationnews/civil_procedure/101515-discovery-rules-abuse.html https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/litigationnews/civil... A sufficiently annoyed judge has a broad range of sanctions available for punishing people who get caught gaming the system. (Some of these sanctions may take years to fully play out, though.)
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  It's pretty hard to catch if your only search interface is through the liar.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    Moreover, I've seen 'mistakes' and intentionally 'last minute' delivery of documents myself at trials, along with what essentially amounts to blatant filibustering. It was considered 'part of the game'. No one was punished.
    - milesrout 9y ago
      I've seen many cases thrown out of court for this.
      - stanleydrew 9y ago
        That's great if you're the defendant...
        9y ago

by YCode 9y ago

huangc10 9y ago

I have to...completely agree with you on your analogy. You forgot to mention the part about the urine sample.

oh_sigh 9y ago

Also, there is no reason to believe that a bad actor would steal 14,000 documents from a previous company, and then on the first day on the job go and upload them to the company git server. If I knew I was being nefarious, I would keep those documents on a completely airgapped computer in a private (non-company) space, only reference them when I was alone, and then bring information into the company only through my brain(and probably, with a reasonable parallel reconstruction already determined).

ergothus 9y ago
I don't disagree with your assessment in general, the problem is that when you take the set of "criminals", and then further drill in to "criminals that actually get accused", you rapidly change the ratio of "clever" to "think-they-are-clever". I'm not saying all criminals are stupid [Edit: stupid, careless, ignorant, poor at prediction, poor at risk calculation, take your pick] ...just that many are. And the really clever ones are often able to do it without even getting accused. So you're left with a group that has a LOT of facepalm-inducing members. And sad to say, even filtering the list for people in high ranking positions doesn't help that much. Apparently "actually be a clever criminal" and "be a successful business person" don't overlap a lot. (I imagine "ABLE to be a clever criminal" has more overlap...but most decide not to.) Side story: When I was a young kid (8?) my mom sternly told me "I don't EVER want to hear of you...committing a crime you can't retire on". Oddly enough, that was far more valuable than just saying "don't commit a crime". It had a logic my young brain could understand more easily than base morals or even evaluating the odds of getting caught. It inured me to a fair amount of peer pressure until I was old enough to decide for myself (and kids have few opportunities to commit huge crimes). Each kid is different, of course, but I recommend this to all parents of young children.
- kmonsen 9y ago
  I think you should change stupid with careless, or calculated risk or something like that.
  - __jal 9y ago
    I think we need less auditing of other people's word choice, to be honest. /meta
- IshKebab 9y ago
  This isn't about criminals exactly. It's about an engineer thinking "My future job is going to be a huge pain without access to the shared drive that has all our notes and matlab scripts and research papers. Maybe I'll just make a copy and keep it for occasional reference in case I need to look something up.".
  - matt4077 9y ago
    "Also I'll set up a company through a straw man and convince my employer to buy it for a few hundred million, in case I ever need a few hundred million. Then, I'll abscond with those documents and few select google employees and start my own thing. With matlab and LIDARS! Which reminds me: I should really take a long walk with this Travis guy. Maybe he has a need for 'occasional reference'".
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  I don't disagree, but my point is this: Finding these files on Uber servers certainly is, if not proof of guilt, at least very damning. However, lack of files on Uber servers isn't proof of innocence.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- munificent 9y ago
  > I'm not saying all criminals are stupid [Edit: stupid, careless, ignorant, poor at prediction, poor at risk calculation, take your pick] ...just that many are. And the really clever ones are often able to do it without even getting accused. So you're left with a group that has a LOT of facepalm-inducing members. Right, it's a classic example of survivorship bias.
Twirrim 9y ago
If you look at the evidence Google presented, I'm really not convinced he thought things through at all. For someone seemingly trying to do something illegal, he's been curiously inept: > Summer 2015 - Anthony Levandowski told Pierre-Yves Droz, a colleague at Waymo, that he had talked with an Uber executive about forming a self-driving car startup and that Uber would be interested in buying that startup. .. whole bunch of stuff around retrieving the design data from Waymo/Google ... > January 5, 2016 - Levandowski took a walk with Droz. In Pierre-Yves’ deposition, he claims that Levandowski “told him that he planned to ‘replicate’ Waymo’s technology at a new company he was forming.” (Droz 27) .. another bit of downloading .. > January 14, 2016 - Levandowski was seen meeting at Uber’s headquarters and the news travelled back to Droz. Droz asked Levandowski about this, and he admitted he had met with Uber and was looking for investors for his new company. (Droz 29, Filing 48) > January 15, 2016 - Levandowski officially forms 280 Systems (in stealth mode). Note that this was one day after his meeting with Uber. (Filing 49) > January 27, 2016 - Levandowski resigns from Waymo without notice. (Filing 49) > February 1, 2016 - Levandowski forms Otto Trucking (this is also in stealth mode). (Filing 49)

handedness 9y ago

Which is so absurd on the face of it that it almost certainly can't be what's happening here. Having had an inside view into several situations which received public coverage, it's clear to me that the old adage of, “a man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one,” applies not just to people, but to the entities they wield.

ekidd 9y ago

> Offhand, this kind of sounds like a parent asking their teenager to go and search their own room for drugs. I have expressed this attitude to corporate lawyers before, and asked them how the system deals with bad actors. Basically, if a judge catches you lying during discovery, they can issue a default judgement against you and impose very serious additional damages. For example: http://newenglandinhouse.com/2015/06/09/default-judgment-affirmed-based-on-discovery-violations/ http://newenglandinhouse.com/2015/06/09/default-judgment-aff... Furthermore, the lawyers in question can be disbarred: https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/litigationnews/civil_procedure/101515-discovery-rules-abuse.html https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/litigationnews/civil... A sufficiently annoyed judge has a broad range of sanctions available for punishing people who get caught gaming the system. (Some of these sanctions may take years to fully play out, though.)

Hydraulix989 9y ago
It's pretty hard to catch if your only search interface is through the liar.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  Moreover, I've seen 'mistakes' and intentionally 'last minute' delivery of documents myself at trials, along with what essentially amounts to blatant filibustering. It was considered 'part of the game'. No one was punished.
  - milesrout 9y ago
    I've seen many cases thrown out of court for this.
    - stanleydrew 9y ago
      That's great if you're the defendant...
      - 9y ago