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> Apple engaged in a years-long campaign of false promises, stealth and subterfuge designed to steal Qualcomm’s confidential information and trade secrets for t

> Apple engaged in a years-long campaign of false promises, stealth and subterfuge designed to steal Qualcomm’s confidential information and trade secrets for the purpose of improving the performance of lower-quality modem chipsets I'm so skeptical whenever I read something like that. Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. They seem even more unlikely at a company with the scale, success, and talent of Apple. Coordinated corporate espionage would be a Really Big Deal, and something I doubt Apple would risk over modem performance. (VW's diesel scandal is the closest thing I can think of. Of course, there are other examples in finance like Enron.) Maybe I'm biased from my experience at Google. (I know they're a favorite HN punching bag, but we try really hard to do the right thing regarding PII, privacy, ethics, etc.) I can't imagine anyone with the power to condone a trade secret stealing conspiracy at a company like Apple would do so. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

davidw 8y ago
I agree it's good to be skeptical, but that's hardly the first large-scale shady thing some of these places have been involved in: https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-judge-approves-415-million-settlement-in-tech-worker-lawsuit-2015-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-judge-approves-415-mill...
- bsimpson 8y ago
  Fair point. Still, a gentleman's agreement between frienemy titans of industry (though illegal) is understandable: "Don't take my guys, and I won't take yours". I have a hard time believing someone at Apple said "let's engage in a multi-year conspiracy to siphon Qualcomm trade secrets to Intel."
  - poooogles 8y ago
    >Fair point. Still, a gentleman's agreement between frienemy titans of industry (though illegal) is understandable What? No it's not understandable. It's wage fixing and is totally immoral; it works against everything a free market is supposed to be. You might as well move to the communist model and have everyone paid $xxx (hyperbole but the point isn't that far off it).
  - adventured 8y ago
    That's not a gentleman's agreement. It's the exact opposite when you actually consider the target of abuse in the agreement: their own employees, people, whose lives they were seeking to actively harm. If they'll actively, illegally, seek to harm their own people, who could question whether they'd illegally try to harm a competing company? It makes perfect sense that that would be in the realm of consideration.
    - posterboy 8y ago
      You can also see it differently: When the supply is locked out, they have to compete on price harder from the beginning and have less opportunity to fire. If there's an oversupply, of course it's a bit different.
  - davidw 8y ago
    There's nothing gentlemanly about ripping off people who work for you to the tune of millions of dollars.
aptidude187 8y ago
"but we try really hard to do the right thing regarding PII, privacy, ethics, etc." - People don't care about what you are trying but about what you are _actually doing_ , you know, actions speak louder than words do.
- bsimpson 8y ago
  We have rules, processes, annual trainings, etc. designed to ensure that sensitive data is only kept for reasonable purposes; that access is granted on a need-to-know basis; and that people consider both ethics and the law in their decisions. I suspect Apple does too. I have a hard time believing that a company with that rigor intentionally steals trade secrets from one vendor and passes them to another.
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    And yet, with all that rigor, you still captured and saved sniffed wifi data. And hired and encouraged folks like Levandowski. Caught only by accident. (I know, he wronged Google. Just pointing out that this rigor hasn't stopped characters like Levandowski.) Your rules, processes, trainings are like the shite lock on the door of my house. They are for the honest folks. And by the way, compelled upon you by FCC decree, not taken on voluntarily. This could very easily happen at Google. Not saying it did, just that I am not shocked and surprised that it could. You have >100k staff. You really think they are all so noble?
hinkley 8y ago
Qualcomm doesn’t have any sort of record of good corporate citizenship. When they come out saying things like this my first suspicion is that they are projecting.
ashelmire 8y ago
>Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. This is incredibly naive and pretty obviously wrong; a lot of big names have gone to jail for fraud and conspiracy, despite being brilliant and having all the money they could spend to protect them. We need look no further than the front page of any newspaper to discover the latest large-scale effort to deceive.
1999 8y ago
I think the phrasing of the line you quoted is too strong, but the same effect can be created without any kind of ringleader or secret cabal arrangement. You only need the right preconditions: 1. Incentive (i.e. Intel tech is cheaper than Qualcomm, but worse). 2. Pressure (i.e. lower the BOM because we're selling 10 million of these a month) 3. Lack of effective oversight. FWIW I also differ on the statement "deceit is rare". I think ~10% of people will lie if it makes them look better short term, and ~1% will lie aggressively i.e. fraud or relationship aggression. When there is a job with a big incentive for deceit and inadequate oversight it will filter in favor of the liars. Of course this particular case could be flimsy, all these companies are suing each other all the time, it is impossible to tell what is actually going on.
erentz 8y ago
I’ve been on both the customer and vendor side of these kinds of things. It’s easy to see this happening in my experience. Customers usually want their vendors to be competitive, because that’s better for them and lowering prices. Also, some people at certain customers have their favorite vendors for whatever reasons. (Sometimes it’s just history, sometimes it because some vendor spends a lot of money taking key players out getting them drunk and making friends with them, etc.). So this leads to information from Vendor A frequently finding its way to Vendor B via the customer. Vendors know this. Sending actual source code seems a little next level from the usual sharing of specs, roadmaps, decks, etc. that happens every day. But it’s not at all unrealistic somebody did that to me.
geezerjay 8y ago
> I'm so skeptical whenever I read something like that. Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. This assertion is blatantly unrealistic, and purposedly ignores the fact that industrial espionage is widespread and politics drive most business strategies.
- kbenson 8y ago
  Neither you nor the GP actually provide evidence, which means both your comments really just pander to people that have the same underlying beliefs, which in this case are opposite of each other. If one of you could cite some sources, we might actually get somewhere.
mc32 8y ago
I believe Qualcomm, snd others, usually cooperate and work with many vendors and grant access to their IP to many of these partners and overseas offices. And while they likely implement many tortuous security and auditing measures, invariably people outside Qualcomm will have access to their IP. And it’s necessary to get work done. And people pass audits and such, but work must happen and people granted acccess. I bet there are nice holes for insiders (be they emps, partners, offshore, etc.), to get access and exfiltrate if they were so inclined. Often it’s only legal repercussions which keep this from happening more often.
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
> I'm so skeptical whenever I read something like that. Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. And, yet, we have the example of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. I'm involved in the same industry, and know how little it would take to fudge the emissions test results. Yet the company was, in fact, active in a widespread conspiracy to defraud regulators and auditors. And THEN we find out that A LOT of other people and companies were doing the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal. None of this particularly surprises me. It's clear the industry allowed themselves to get trampled by grandstanding politicians, who passed emissions laws that are almost too restrictive to adhere to. The only way to do it is to spend exorbitant amounts of money on aftertreatment systems. This may have been the government's goal all along, as a "voluntary carbon tax," but it's clear that the only place you can make these expensive additions to the product package is in heavy trucks; NOT in passenger cars. The longer I live, the more I attribute to malice. When you strive to correct the ignorance, but the behavior doesn't change... what are you left with?
vl 8y ago
They are obviously making the strongest possible claim they can potentially make, since facts are open to interpretation. It would be sub-optimal strategy to file a lawsuit and say "it's kinda bad, can you take a look?"
kurthr 8y ago
I'd be surprised if every company in every country came by this maxim, "Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare." Some business cultures are more and less willing to accept collusion and espionage against their suppliers and competitors to make more money. I can say that in many cultures both in the US, Germany, Korea, Russia, and China (in what order?) such deceit is expected and considered normal business practice. If you sit and talk with both engineers and business leaders they will be fairly open about it (and concerned about their comoetitors). It may not be long term efficient, but it is definitely short term profitable. Conspiracies based on profit (like the Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe hiring collusion) are not more rare than CEOs getting caught discussing them on email. A counter quote from Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
> "Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare." "Even" is not the right word there. It's precisely as organizations grow in size that deceit and conspiracy start to become commonplace. For instance speaking of Apple and Google, they (along with Adobe and Intel) secretly conspired in an unlawful agreement to keep wages low by agreeing to never compete for each others' employees. In the end they ended up getting a firm slap on the wrist to the tune of $415 million. [1] Great ethics there. In practice Hanlon's Razor is not very useful. Many large corporations, certainly including Google, do engage in malicious behavior. But they invariably ensure there is some form of plausible deniability to minimize the worst case outcomes. And that plausible deniability is often connected to some form of plausible ineptitude or behavior they were supposedly not complicit in, let alone directing. Because of this tendency Hanlon's Razor would end up being, "Never believe a large corporation would do anything malicious." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
chocolatebunny 8y ago
This might have been a single Apple developer trying to get shit done. They might have had a problem with Intel software and just said "do it like Qualcomm did it" and provided them with a snippet of code.
rodgerd 8y ago
> Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. Yeah, I mean imagine if Apple had a track record of leading a multi-company effort to illegally suppress staff salaries. Could never happen.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

davidw 8y ago

I agree it's good to be skeptical, but that's hardly the first large-scale shady thing some of these places have been involved in: https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-judge-approves-415-million-settlement-in-tech-worker-lawsuit-2015-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-judge-approves-415-mill...

bsimpson 8y ago
Fair point. Still, a gentleman's agreement between frienemy titans of industry (though illegal) is understandable: "Don't take my guys, and I won't take yours". I have a hard time believing someone at Apple said "let's engage in a multi-year conspiracy to siphon Qualcomm trade secrets to Intel."
- poooogles 8y ago
  >Fair point. Still, a gentleman's agreement between frienemy titans of industry (though illegal) is understandable What? No it's not understandable. It's wage fixing and is totally immoral; it works against everything a free market is supposed to be. You might as well move to the communist model and have everyone paid $xxx (hyperbole but the point isn't that far off it).
- adventured 8y ago
  That's not a gentleman's agreement. It's the exact opposite when you actually consider the target of abuse in the agreement: their own employees, people, whose lives they were seeking to actively harm. If they'll actively, illegally, seek to harm their own people, who could question whether they'd illegally try to harm a competing company? It makes perfect sense that that would be in the realm of consideration.
  - posterboy 8y ago
    You can also see it differently: When the supply is locked out, they have to compete on price harder from the beginning and have less opportunity to fire. If there's an oversupply, of course it's a bit different.
- davidw 8y ago
  There's nothing gentlemanly about ripping off people who work for you to the tune of millions of dollars.

aptidude187 8y ago

"but we try really hard to do the right thing regarding PII, privacy, ethics, etc." - People don't care about what you are trying but about what you are _actually doing_ , you know, actions speak louder than words do.

bsimpson 8y ago
We have rules, processes, annual trainings, etc. designed to ensure that sensitive data is only kept for reasonable purposes; that access is granted on a need-to-know basis; and that people consider both ethics and the law in their decisions. I suspect Apple does too. I have a hard time believing that a company with that rigor intentionally steals trade secrets from one vendor and passes them to another.
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  And yet, with all that rigor, you still captured and saved sniffed wifi data. And hired and encouraged folks like Levandowski. Caught only by accident. (I know, he wronged Google. Just pointing out that this rigor hasn't stopped characters like Levandowski.) Your rules, processes, trainings are like the shite lock on the door of my house. They are for the honest folks. And by the way, compelled upon you by FCC decree, not taken on voluntarily. This could very easily happen at Google. Not saying it did, just that I am not shocked and surprised that it could. You have >100k staff. You really think they are all so noble?

hinkley 8y ago

Qualcomm doesn’t have any sort of record of good corporate citizenship. When they come out saying things like this my first suspicion is that they are projecting.

ashelmire 8y ago

>Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. This is incredibly naive and pretty obviously wrong; a lot of big names have gone to jail for fraud and conspiracy, despite being brilliant and having all the money they could spend to protect them. We need look no further than the front page of any newspaper to discover the latest large-scale effort to deceive.

1999 8y ago

I think the phrasing of the line you quoted is too strong, but the same effect can be created without any kind of ringleader or secret cabal arrangement. You only need the right preconditions: 1. Incentive (i.e. Intel tech is cheaper than Qualcomm, but worse). 2. Pressure (i.e. lower the BOM because we're selling 10 million of these a month) 3. Lack of effective oversight. FWIW I also differ on the statement "deceit is rare". I think ~10% of people will lie if it makes them look better short term, and ~1% will lie aggressively i.e. fraud or relationship aggression. When there is a job with a big incentive for deceit and inadequate oversight it will filter in favor of the liars. Of course this particular case could be flimsy, all these companies are suing each other all the time, it is impossible to tell what is actually going on.

erentz 8y ago

I’ve been on both the customer and vendor side of these kinds of things. It’s easy to see this happening in my experience. Customers usually want their vendors to be competitive, because that’s better for them and lowering prices. Also, some people at certain customers have their favorite vendors for whatever reasons. (Sometimes it’s just history, sometimes it because some vendor spends a lot of money taking key players out getting them drunk and making friends with them, etc.). So this leads to information from Vendor A frequently finding its way to Vendor B via the customer. Vendors know this. Sending actual source code seems a little next level from the usual sharing of specs, roadmaps, decks, etc. that happens every day. But it’s not at all unrealistic somebody did that to me.

geezerjay 8y ago

> I'm so skeptical whenever I read something like that. Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. This assertion is blatantly unrealistic, and purposedly ignores the fact that industrial espionage is widespread and politics drive most business strategies.

kbenson 8y ago
Neither you nor the GP actually provide evidence, which means both your comments really just pander to people that have the same underlying beliefs, which in this case are opposite of each other. If one of you could cite some sources, we might actually get somewhere.

mc32 8y ago

I believe Qualcomm, snd others, usually cooperate and work with many vendors and grant access to their IP to many of these partners and overseas offices. And while they likely implement many tortuous security and auditing measures, invariably people outside Qualcomm will have access to their IP. And it’s necessary to get work done. And people pass audits and such, but work must happen and people granted acccess. I bet there are nice holes for insiders (be they emps, partners, offshore, etc.), to get access and exfiltrate if they were so inclined. Often it’s only legal repercussions which keep this from happening more often.

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago

> I'm so skeptical whenever I read something like that. Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. And, yet, we have the example of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. I'm involved in the same industry, and know how little it would take to fudge the emissions test results. Yet the company was, in fact, active in a widespread conspiracy to defraud regulators and auditors. And THEN we find out that A LOT of other people and companies were doing the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal. None of this particularly surprises me. It's clear the industry allowed themselves to get trampled by grandstanding politicians, who passed emissions laws that are almost too restrictive to adhere to. The only way to do it is to spend exorbitant amounts of money on aftertreatment systems. This may have been the government's goal all along, as a "voluntary carbon tax," but it's clear that the only place you can make these expensive additions to the product package is in heavy trucks; NOT in passenger cars. The longer I live, the more I attribute to malice. When you strive to correct the ignorance, but the behavior doesn't change... what are you left with?

vl 8y ago

They are obviously making the strongest possible claim they can potentially make, since facts are open to interpretation. It would be sub-optimal strategy to file a lawsuit and say "it's kinda bad, can you take a look?"

kurthr 8y ago

I'd be surprised if every company in every country came by this maxim, "Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare." Some business cultures are more and less willing to accept collusion and espionage against their suppliers and competitors to make more money. I can say that in many cultures both in the US, Germany, Korea, Russia, and China (in what order?) such deceit is expected and considered normal business practice. If you sit and talk with both engineers and business leaders they will be fairly open about it (and concerned about their comoetitors). It may not be long term efficient, but it is definitely short term profitable. Conspiracies based on profit (like the Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe hiring collusion) are not more rare than CEOs getting caught discussing them on email. A counter quote from Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

> "Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare." "Even" is not the right word there. It's precisely as organizations grow in size that deceit and conspiracy start to become commonplace. For instance speaking of Apple and Google, they (along with Adobe and Intel) secretly conspired in an unlawful agreement to keep wages low by agreeing to never compete for each others' employees. In the end they ended up getting a firm slap on the wrist to the tune of $415 million. [1] Great ethics there. In practice Hanlon's Razor is not very useful. Many large corporations, certainly including Google, do engage in malicious behavior. But they invariably ensure there is some form of plausible deniability to minimize the worst case outcomes. And that plausible deniability is often connected to some form of plausible ineptitude or behavior they were supposedly not complicit in, let alone directing. Because of this tendency Hanlon's Razor would end up being, "Never believe a large corporation would do anything malicious." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

chocolatebunny 8y ago

This might have been a single Apple developer trying to get shit done. They might have had a problem with Intel software and just said "do it like Qualcomm did it" and provided them with a snippet of code.

rodgerd 8y ago

> Even on small scales, deceit and conspiracy are rare. Yeah, I mean imagine if Apple had a track record of leading a multi-company effort to illegally suppress staff salaries. Could never happen.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]