7 ms·
I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to lea
by eob 8y ago
I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home.
What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation “it was just a cultural misunderstanding”
I want to be careful not to point fingers at a particular country or culture, but that experience taught me that a grey-area version of corporate espionage is _very real_ in academia — an environment that operates with all guards down and no defenses against it.
[Edited to fix tappos]
- frozenport 8y agoAnother hilarious example is Steve Johnsons (and companies)s casimir force paper which was copied figure by figure by some Chinese researchers. Absolutely nothing happened to those Chinese "scholars".
- ryacko 8y agoWhat grey area? It was bad enough they decided to send him home.
- Dirlewanger 8y agoIt's bad because MIT reprimanded him for "scrap[ing] every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home"? That's felonious territory. He should have been deported indefinitely.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- coldacid 8y agoOr imprisoned locally indefinitely.
- sidr 8y agoBut not bad enough that they could resist the pressure to have him back with just an excuse of "oopsies".
- partiallypro 8y agoHow was it bad that they sent him home? A spy is a spy. In China they would have just killed him or imprisoned him if a student were sending information "back home." If you don't believe me that China simply kills spies, look at the spy purges in the Obama years after a breach in the CIA's communications.
- jmts 8y agoReread their post. They said their action was bad enough for them to be sent home. Not that it was a bad decision for them to be sent home.
- ryacko 8y agoI have read enough spy novels to become convinced that both sides just send each other lies and siphon off their budgets for personal luxuries.
- gnu8 8y agoBy home, do you mean their personal network, their employer, or their country?
- balabaster 8y agoOne would assume to the corporation donating the money. I wouldn't naturally assume it was to his Mom or "China." I think a fair number of corporations assume that if they're paying you to do research, that they're entitled to the research and any results you obtain from it. If I were sending data "back home" I wouldn't be sending it to "England." I'll be honest, I wouldn't have the first clue who to contact, unless MI6 had contacted me and asked me for the information, which I doubt they would - I'd be honestly astonished if I'd ever done anything in my life interesting enough for them to even notice who I am, and I wouldn't have the first clue who to send it to unless they came to me. I doubt forqueenandcountry@mi6.org is a valid place to send file dumps. The only "back home" that would be relevant to me would be my employer.
- gnu8 8y agoThe reason I asked the question is because sometimes there is a tendency to think of "China" as a monolithic entity and say "China" is spying on companies or putting bugs in the cellular equipment and so on. I've even caught myself doing that. But it's a lazy way of thinking because China is full of individuals pursuing their own goals. It is for the same reason that I asked whether the person copied the files to his own system or his employer's. No doubt this person has their own interest in computers and technology, and it's entirely reasonable to think that they would want the MIT CSAIL files for themselves, outside of any orders from their employer to copy the information.
- balabaster 8y agoAssuming they want the files for themselves is also a fair assessment. Being able to come back to data at a later point and trawl through it again to gain different or more nuanced understanding is useful. This is something I could imagine doing. I would definitely ask before I did it though. Just assuming you could is taking liberties somewhat.
- techie128 8y agoBeing a big believer in Open Source and Freedom of Knowledge, I think we, as humans, would progress much more quickly if we broke down barriers to knowledge sharing. It would help everyone progress much more quickly. Keeping knowledge secret, especially in research, which is usually publicly funded is not the right thing. We can debate all we want but the reality is that China has progressed and its people have benefitted through better living standards. Now those people are investing in other countries creating jobs and improving living standards across poor countries. Weirdly enough one such beneficiary has been India and African countries. Just 5 years ago India could not domestically manufacture cell phones. Now there are over 260 factories with 95% of the phones being produced in the country. This has been a big benefit to India and its people. Funny how that worked out? I am not sure what counts as "stealing" in terms of IP. I am a firm believer in protecting IP but at the same time you cannot argue that freely sharing knowledge has its own benefits. IP laws (especially patents) need to be revisited to make sure they serve their purpose and reasonably help inventors benefit from their inventions. Edit: I must also clarify that this goes both ways. The way Chinese don't end up sharing knowledge is bad. They also do not respect IP law and contracts which needs to drastically change. If they would have respected those and given a fair playing field for foreign companies, I don't think this would be a big issue today.
- Brain_Thief 8y agoI agree with the general spirit of what you're stating, but the fact of the matter is that the Chinese government has proven conclusively that its vision of the future is not one that incorporates a free flow of information or the preservation of individual rights; the Chinese government as an entity is not a viable partner in the task of building the society of free information you envision - it is an obstacle standing in the way. Unfortunately, the Chinese government has chosen to use its economic prosperity to brutally subjugate ethnic minorities and construct an authoritarian nightmare that fully realizes Orwell's visions of state rule [1]. Every bit of available data indicates that the Chinese government would censor you and everyone you know if it had the ability to do so; the ruling party have demonstrated their willingness to violently destroy any person, group, or ideology that they disapprove of. Any other assessment of the situation is, at best, naive to the point of being dangerous. The twentieth century (not to mention the past ten years) has taught us that democracy is a fragile thing; it is extremely important that western citizens be vigilant and open-eyed when assessing who to deal with in educational, political, and business theaters. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xinjiang-china-surveillance-prison.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...
- chrischen 8y agoTo be fair, cheating and stealing is a cultural norm over there!
- msie 8y agoUh, if there was explicit instruction at the beginning not to scrape internal data and code, then there would be no misunderstanding in the first place. Was there any NDA???
- oh_sigh 8y agoMaybe the cultural misunderstanding was that you actually need to pay attention to those explicit instructions.
- justinjlynn 8y ago"Woah, I didn't know it was like... a rule, bro."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]