HTC Executives Arrested Over Leaked Trade Secrets 41
An anonymous reader writes "Three HTC executives have been arrested on suspicion of leaking corporate secrets. From the article: Taipei prosecutors confirmed that HTC vice president of product design Thomas Chien, research and development director Wu Chien-Hung and senior manager of design and innovation Justin Huang were arrested on Friday. Mr Chien and Mr Chien-Hung remain in custody, while Mr Huang was released on bail, prosecutors office spokesman Mou Hsin Huang said. The executives were also accused of making false commission fee claims totaling around T$10m ($221,000). No further details about the allegations were immediately available.'"
Re:and again... (Score:4, Informative)
"This country is SCREWED until corporations are under control."
You are aware this happened in Taiwan, right? I mean the location (Taipei, a city there) is named right in the first part of the summary... you don't even have to RTFA...
Re:and again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry. The OP's rant probably applies to most places.
Re: (Score:3)
This country is SCREWED until literacy is common place.
Re: (Score:1)
If you are going to pick on someone else's reading skills, then your English skills need to be better. The word is "commonplace". It's not two words.
Corporations under control: not an option. (Score:1)
What did they steal? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, "special design" has been a common issue with Android phones. OEM custom firmware like Sense, TouchWiz, etc. has typically been awful UX-wise compared to stock Android.
Re:What did they steal? (Score:5, Funny)
How much are the secrets of going into a surprisingly steep decline worth these days?
Considering the expansive definition of what a "trade secret" is these days, it could be grandma's tuna cassarole recipe that the secretary shared. Afterall, maybe someone decided to make a restaurant based on it, and thus it was supposed to be a secret recipe and... you know, the recipe was actually a wiccan spell to summon the lesser demon of stupidity; Litigatus.
Re: (Score:3)
That's right. Everyone in Germany called Schmidt shares a parent, everyone from Wales called Jones shares a parent and everyone in the USA called Johnson shares a parent. It's the same phenomenon.
Re: (Score:3)
Didn't even work that into a Monty Python Spanish Inquisition reference? Lame. We expect better of Slashdot trolls.
Re: (Score:2)
Johnson, Wilson, Jackson, Anderson... is that some kind of joke or do they all share a parent?
Re:Them names. (Score:4, Funny)
It's just coincidence that all were fathered by their sons traveling back in time.
Re:Them names. (Score:5, Informative)
They all have different family names.
Thomas Chien: family name is "Chien"
Wu Chien-Hung: family name is "Wu"
Justin Huang: family name is "Huang"
Mou Hsin Huang: family name is "Mou"
In Chinese, the family name is traditionally given first. Chinese who live in or frequently visit Western countries, or who often deal with Western visitors, often adopt Western given names for the convenience of people who don't speak Chinese. In such cases, they place the family name last, like most Westerners do, since this is what most Westerners expect. (My fiancée does this. And no, I'm not giving you either version of her name. :P)
Example: The famous Hong Kong actor Chan Gong-sang is better is known to English speakers as Jackie Chan. His family name is Chan.
Not sure what happens when Jackie visits Hungary, though. ;)
Re:Them names. (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like the article got the guy's name backwards. In Chinese, your family name comes first. So, "Wu Chien-Huang" would be properly westernized as "Mr. Wu". If, in fact, his family name were "Chien-Huang", is proper Romanized representation would be "Chien-Huang Wu".
Complicating the westernization of Chinese names, Chinese relies heavily upon inflection (so much so, that the various inflections are called "tones"). Think of the various ways you can say "Merry Christmas" to someone, expressing the entire range of feelings from "Greetings! I hope you're enjoying your holiday season" to "Fuck you, eat shit, and die!" using the same two words, depending upon how you say them.
The net result is that tens of thousands of name-syllables, represented by distinct characters in Chinese, get collapsed down to just a few hundred Roman letter sequences. Under the BEST circumstances (properly rendered into canonical Pinyin, tone accents and all), each syllable still has an ambiguity of ~2.5 characters per syllable (ie, each syllable, like "Wu", "Chien", or "Huang" could be one of 2 or 3 different Chinese characters). Strip away the accents & take liberties with the phonetics, and it's more like 5-20 per syllable. But wait... it gets worse. Just about every word in Chinese ALSO has multiple homonyms -- words that are pronounced the same, but written differently. Think, "to, too, two".
So... given only an ASCII-Romanized representation of a name like "Wu Chien-Huang", you can reasonably guess that Mr. Wu's actual name is one of approximately 20-30 possibilities. Maybe as few as a dozen, if you spend some time researching his family tree and can get the family name unambiguously nailed down to one or two possibilities (ie, figuring out whether it's "///Wu///", or "***Wu***"). But without actually seeing it written in proper Chinese, or asking his mother, or someone who saw his name written in proper Chinese at some point in time), NOBODY could ever be 100% sure what name his mother intended him to have.
Run for your lives (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah they probably sent an email to someone who uses Gmail, or maybe they used a HTC Android phone for anything. Same result, all your data (and the famous meta-data) leaked right there. Jail-time!
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, the point of trade secrets is that you keep them secret, but it's your job to do so, not the public's. Having criminal laws that punish leaking of trade secrets has to be one of the worst types of fascist [econlib.org] corporatism. If the patent system ever had any merit, even in theory, then trade secret laws would work against patents. That might even be a legal theory that could be used to defeat such laws in the US.
Civil liability is, of course, entirely reasonable.
Golden Parachute? (Score:2)
Perhaps this is a new corporate version of an exit clause for the "golden parachute" so many execs have :-)
I can imagine the secrets -- power button and volume rocker location: left, right, or top of the case.....