Former Tesla Employees Brought Stolen Documents To Self-Driving Startup Zoox (theverge.com) 45
Self-driving startup Zoox has admitted that four of its employees took confidential documents from their previous employer Tesla, according to a statement issued after the company settled a lawsuit this week over the matter. The Verge reports: "Zoox acknowledges that certain of its new hires from Tesla were in possession of Tesla documents pertaining to shipping, receiving, and warehouse procedures when they joined Zoox's logistics team," the startup said in a statement to Reuters. Zoox says it will pay Tesla an undisclosed amount of money and will perform an audit to "ensure that no Zoox employees have retained or are using Tesla confidential information." Zoox says it "regrets the actions of those employees," and says it will also "conduct enhanced confidentiality training to ensure that all Zoox employees are aware of and respect their confidentiality obligations."
God no! (Score:4, Funny)
were in possession of Tesla documents pertaining to shipping, receiving, and warehouse procedures
Zoox says it will pay Tesla an undisclosed amount of money
"Sources say it could be as high as $4.98."
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You jest but really what is Tesla's self driving tech actually worth?
What's odd is that this isn't even over self-driving tech. It's over logistical procedures....
Re:God no! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, I can't hear your "way behind" comment after having just gotten back from my anyone-can-buy, not-locked-to-specific-roads-or-regions, no-3d-premapping-cheats-required car having driven all of my out-of-town driving, from Reykjavík to (TH)orlákshöfn, (TH)orlákshöfn to Grindavík, and Grindavík back to Reykjavík, without any interventions.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a near-term "robotaxi" optimist; I strongly support keeping humans in the loop for the next several years at least - the human is smarter than the car. But the "way behind" comment is laughable. There's nothing that's commercially available and doesn't rely on 3d-premapping cheats that's even close.
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I'm sorry, I can't hear your "way behind" comment after having just gotten back from my anyone-can-buy, not-locked-to-specific-roads-or-regions, no-3d-premapping-cheats-required car having driven all of my out-of-town driving, from Reykjavík to (TH)orlákshöfn, (TH)orlákshöfn to Grindavík, and Grindavík back to Reykjavík, without any interventions.
Well-if the weather the one time I flew into Reykjavik in mid summer is any indication (and wasn't getting passport stamped so couldn't leave the plane)- they've got the driving in weather part down pretty well. I would assume traffic isn't much of a worry though.
PS: Sitting in the jumpseat of an aircraft watching the pilots pull out crosswind tables waiting minute by minute for gusts to die down so it's within maximums for the aircraft, combined with very hilly terrain and a ceiling of a couple hundred fe
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Other companies have similar capability using just cameras. Lane following is fairly common these days even on mid range vehicles. Aside from a few tricks like lane changing that's basically all the Tesla system does that this point, especially in Europe where the more alpha quality stuff is disabled.
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Tesla can't read traffic lights. The code doesn't work, as often as not it misses them or interprets random red and green objects as lights.
Waymo uses lidar and cameras to map the world around the car. Maps are supplemental. They can locate the car with high precision using major landmarks like buildings that rarely move. They can see traffic lights. Their system is proven and only needs to scale.
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You'll have to explain to me how lidar helps interpret whether a traffic light is red or green.
Where I live, we occasionally have portable traffic lights to control traffic flow in road works that close a lane. Often enough that it's a use-case that *must* be accounted for. How does lidar help in this situation?
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Lidar helps identify the traffic light. Cameras have a hard time because they are black boxes with bright lights on them without fixed placement relative to the road. With mapping so the car can position itself very accurately and lidar so that it can more easily identify the traffic light itself against the background of other lights and random red/green/amber coloured objects.
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I think by Way Behind, the poster is confusing, in developing technology that shows some promise, vs what is available now.
I use to work for a company making the next generation Health Care Systems, I left that job, and went to a hospital. I understand the feeling that I may not be using the best technology because I was using next-generation stuff. However, one of the reasons why I left that company as they weren't selling the next-gen product thus I wasn't getting paid what I felt I was worth. Working
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wow a whole 51 miles one way, your a beast.
Driving from my current home to where I grew up is 153 miles one way without leaving the state - in a car without any in-car navigation.
No idea what "not-locked-to-specific-roads-or-regions" crap means that has no meaning in the USA.
worth more as an example (Score:3)
This is a classic example of wisdom and experience coming from failure. Tesla's self-driving IP is most valuable as an example of what not to do.
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Well, the technology is better than anything else on the commercial market. The other guys have prototypes, that are not commercially available. Tesla Self Driving tech is available to the public. Granted it isn't the fully self-driving car we are thinking of. However, It will keep you in your traffic lane, the advanced versions will pass cars, and change lanes. These features will not get you from the garage to work and back, but for long trips, you can relax your eyes. Or stuck in traffic, you can just
No he didn't (Score:5, Funny)
No stealing involved, it's only a copy, the original is still there, I checked.
"shipping, receiving, and warehouse procedures"? (Score:2)
Something taught at any university with a business program, it's called Manufacturing Theory.
WTF?
Re: "shipping, receiving, and warehouse procedures (Score:2)
That's something that was mastered by people with high school diplomas - at best. I knew business majors studied stupid shit, but I guess I underestimated how stupid.
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Um, it's complicated stuff. Certainly nothing you get a degree in, but it could easily be a full course. Doing shipping, receiving, and warehousing efficiently in a large manufacturer can translate to added efficiency on the factory floor. This isn't your standard office mailroom stuff. I don't think there was anything really secret in those documents that were stolen, but it would still be a good boost to a manufacturing startup.
Re: "shipping, receiving, and warehouse procedure (Score:2)
I would argue that while the problem is a complex one, the THEORY of warehouse management is straightforward.
In other words, I'm skeptical that a business major who took a course in warehouse management theory would compare favorably to a high school graduate with basic math skills and 3 months of warehouse management experience.
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No.
You are an idiot who evidently has NOT had any experience in manufacturing.
Sure, inventory clerk who just push buttons can follow work procedures and push buttons, but the task of managing people, materials, equipment, schedules, etc in a modern manufacturing plant is hugely complex and encompasses many disciplines.
Leave the documents behind.... (Score:5, Informative)
Non-disclosure contracts are important, leave company documents behind when you leave, all of them.
You can take the knowledge and skills you have learned with you, but you cannot take information that your past employer has paid to develop. That basically means, leave the documents behind, paper or electronic, even if you wrote them. If your previous employer paid you to develop something, they own it, not you. That goes for software, processes, client lists, phone numbers or anything they consider a trade secret.
You can take your skills and technical experience with you. Just be very careful to leave behind the practical application of these skills and experience (or at least the documented proof that you took from your past employer). You can redevelop the systems and processes you know work relatively safely (being careful of any patents) but don't take documentation to jumpstart things. That's pretty stupid.
This has usually been made clear by any new employer I've had. They don't want to get into a legal argument with your past employer and I don't blame them.
Re:Leave the documents behind.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I once worked for a company that had bought out another smaller company. The previous owner of the company (who was still on board as an employee, to manage the transition) decided that (now that he was out of debt) selling the company was a bad idea. So he just got up and left. Normally that would be the end of the story. But this guy took all the software that he wrote and downloaded all the data over a weekend before he quit and started his own company, stealing a lot of customers who he offered a 0 issue transition because he had a perfectly working environment with historical data at home.
Needless to say, we successfully won every lawsuit against him. So the guy went back into debt again. Because he broke so many laws, it was like buying the company for free. It was business, and luckily for him because what he had done could have put him in jail. But we decided to fight for Civil damages vs criminal ones.
His defense was filled with a lot of what we see from Slashdot ANAL responses to these things, claiming he was using an older version of the software before he sold the company, there isn't any proof that it was him (there was). He recked his life, where if he would have taken the money he could have lived a good early retirement.
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Some balk. They want to hit the ground running and show they have the stuff and they want to "contribute" immediately. One more serious talk about the liability and lawsuits makes them see reason.
Try to open source it before you go (Score:5, Insightful)
> That basically means, leave the documents behind, paper or electronic, even if you wrote them. If your previous employer paid you to develop something, they own it, not you. That goes for software, processes, client lists, phone numbers or anything they consider a trade secret.
Absolutely right. If you develop something (documents, processes, software) that may be useful to you in the future, but isn't a key competitive advantage, talk to your boss about releasing it at the time you create it. I've done that successfully several times.
Publishing and open sourcing things has advantages for the business. Software modules that you contribute back to an open source project can get maintained by others, for free, rather than the company needing to permanently pay someone to maintain them in-house. Rather, when they become part of the upstream distribution, they are maintained as part of the upstream project. An employer from six or seven years ago is currently using updated versions of code that I wrote when I worked for them, but they haven't touched it. Other companies have updated it for them when the other organization wanted to use it too.
That also means I can use it, of course, since it's open. I had permission to open source any code that wasn't unique to our industry or our specific environment, anything that had broad application beyond just us and our competitors.
Publishing white papers and things can be good marketing and PR, getting the company's name out there. On the other hand, when I spent a few weeks developing security training to train our employees in general information security topics and asked my boss if I could present the lessons at outside security groups, he gave me permission to release them after *removing* all references to the company . He figured that would avoid any implicit endorsement of the material by company, and reduce or eliminate the risk that something I put in could embarrass the company. I followed up the verbal conversation with an email "here is a copy of the slides with all references to the company removed, and adjusted for an outside audience. This is what I plan to present at the security conference. If it's okay I might put it on my blog or something too". Then I forwarded his reply to my personal email just to have a record of the approval.
At another organization, it would have been more difficult to get approval to release internally-developed software under an open source license. In fact due to fud, the general company policy was that we only used upstream versions of OSS, we never used our own modified version. What I did a couple of times instead of "I want to write this and open source it" is I wrote a message like this to my boss:
There is an open source component that does 90% of what we want. I can work to get the other 10% that we need added to the public distribution, then we can use it. That'll be faster than writing our own software from scratch and the this open source one already has the bugs worked out moreso than if we wrote a new one, with new bugs.
I got approved to "work to get the OSS one to release a version that does what we want". Of course that's exactly the same thing as open sourcing my work on it, just phrased differently.
Nobody can complain about me re-using the work I did since *anybody* can use it, it's open source.
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I tend to have backups of stuff from previous companies. No serious trade secret stuff, and I've never worked two places in a row that were in the same industry. Mostly it's a matter of not purging stuff at home. I have gone backed and looked at older stuff, like how I had an easy to use makefile system, or a script to rebuild a gcc cross compiler toolset so that I could quickly compare different versions, etc. I wouldn't use copies of an old company's code, most of it is horrendous junk.
I have also kept
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A good corollary to this is to make the habit of creating at-home collections of public reference information that you learn while at work. You get used to being able to look information up when we need it, so you don't commit every detail to memory. Then you move to another job, hit a familiar problem, and think "I've seen that problem. It was solved in that paper by that dude that is referenced in private code that I don't have access to anymore." and spend a day doing literature searches that don't turn
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I don't. I never bring stuff home, ever, unless it's on their equipment and I never leave an employer without returning everything that's theirs.If they want me to work from home, great, buy me a laptop so I can. You want me on conference calls at all hours? Again, fine but you are going to pay for the cell phone. I will never do work on my equipment (beyond letting you use my network, and then if YOU require it I'm going to likely ask you to pay for some of the expense). I don't so much as insert a per
I can't imagine... (Score:3)
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They took that nonsense about having 2 o's seriously?
Seemed to be working^H^H^H^H^H^H^H not going so well anymore for ZOOM.
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They took that nonsense about having 2 o's seriously?
Seemed to be working^H^H^H^H^H^H^H not going so well anymore for ZOOM.
You're looking for ^W ;-)
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Xoom on the other hand is doing business hand over fist now as people send remittances back home to shut-in families.
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Well, they were (and still are) a lot of people saying Tesla, Amazon, Google, Facebook... the business plan was crazy, no one is going to buy electric cars, no one will want to buy all their stuff online, no one will want to pay a lot of money for ads on a search engine or social media. With silly names, and much doom and gloom about them going IPO.
90% of the businesses fail their first year. Often due to a lot of silly things, most often the Owners not working hard enough to bring in customers. (A friend
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Back in 2000 during the dot com bubble (gee!) some French guys created a site called kasskooye.com. The name is a pun on a word meaning "ball-breaker". It was full of derision about the silly tech startup names, crazy business plans and IPOs etc. happening at the time. In fact the site still exists... Will never get old apparently!
Do you remember heyidiot.com? From an article, "The site, which calls itself a “cash portal,” sells one product — shares in HeyIdiot.com: “You can buy as much stock as you want with the only rule being that each new purchase must be executed at a successively higher price.” A funny idea — made even more amusing by the fact that two of the site’s creators are prominent Silicon Valley CEOs: Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Network Computer’s Mitchell Kertzman."
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Zoox raised $800M in capital on a $3,2B valuation, which strikes me as insane for a startup. So they had ample cash for poaching.
I really doubt they'd get that sort of valuations now, though. Self-driving valuations have been collapsing. In a year and a half Waymo has gone from a $175B valuation down to $30B.
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Some people like being a big fish in a small pond. Tesla has been growing from the plucky underdog company to a major automaker with a Market Cap of 132.55B compared to Ford 19.73B and GM of 29.82B
When a company gets large, they hire more people, many above them, often in positions that they were hoping to get promoted into.
(Now the fact this particular guy seems to have a lack of business ethics, I expect Tesla didn't want to promote him anyway)
But now seeing he is stuck in a dead-end job, it is probably b
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About 2 years back I met a zoox IT guy at a network security training event. Before that I never heard about the company.
They had a lot of funding out of Australia and if you think Musk over-promises things you should see what these guys were attempting.
Car will be fully 3D printed.
Fully self driving from the first model. Basically like Musk's Robo-Taxi thing based on the M3 but no production car before that.
Symmetrical from front-to-back so it drives either direction without turning around. I
Regrets? (Score:3)
Zoox says it "regrets the actions of those employees,"
No, Zoox regrets that they were caught. We've seen this and similar expressions far too many times not to know its true meaning.
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Zoiks! (Score:2)
WTF? I'll wait for the other shoe (Score:2)
Warehousing. Shipping. Receiving logistics are constrained resources by sheer physical reality.
Where's the rocket science? At most, its an algorithm, electric truck and robotic automation. These are fairly known roadmaps to JIT manufacture.
Waiting for other shoe...