15 ms·

I mean not trying to start a flame war, but everyone is praising how great roborock is but the reality is, most of Xiaomi/Roborock technology is stolen/reverse

• blocked_again 4y ago
  Why does it matter? In grand scheme of things there are now more people who have access to cheaper and efficent cleaning systems. All companies are reverse engineering the Universe anyway. It's not like you build these technologies out of thin air.
  • cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things to point out stolen tech?
  • jker 4y ago
    Please spend the next year doing a bunch of free engineering and design work for me, thanks in advance.
    • blocked_again 4y ago
      The companies knew that copyright infringement is a possibility when developing the tech. They knew the reward was still worth it despite of that. I am not getting anything designing work for you. On the other hand I can launch my own side projects. I know that if they are any good people are going to copy and start rip offs. I am willing to take that risk.
  • knodi123 4y ago
    Why does large-scale corporate IP theft matter? Well, for one thing, I can't imagine the next Neato being willing to invest in all that R&D if a chinese company is going to rip it off and sell it for peanuts, just so the internet can say "wow, this chinese product is amazing, and I don't know why corporate IP theft matters!"
    • brandon272 4y ago
      The risk of someone ripping off your idea, designs, etc. has always existed, exists now more than ever with the internet, yet it doesn’t seem to stop people with ideas from trying to take those ideas to fruition. I’ve never talked to any rational person with an idea they were passionate about who said they weren’t interested in continuing with it because someone else might steal it.
      • toss1 4y ago
        Then you've never talked to any VC or angel investor. A primary concern of any investor is whether you have a defensible 'moat" for your product or service - can you make something that will then have a high barrier to entry of competitors. If you cannot articulate how you will have reasonably solid protection from patents. copyright, or trade secret practices, good luck getting investment. Your only strategy will be to somehow make & stock ready to ship as much of your easily copied product as you can before promoting it, and hope your promotion, marketing, and initial sales are a huge hit BEFORE some Chinese rip-off artist starts marketing it on AliBaba in single-digit days. I've read of cases where people had their product literally found for sale on Chinese sites before their first marketing & customer shipments started, because the design was ripped off from the factory.
    • powerhour 4y ago
      The only reason engineers in the US adopted "clean rooms" was to circumvent copyright law, not because they simply weren't willing to copy IP from their competitors. US companies still invested heavily in R&D. Maybe Chinese companies will do the same?
    • blocked_again 4y ago
      It's a free market. There are plenty of companies investing in R&D even after knowing that there is the possibility of copyright infringement. There is still a huge upside in developing these tech.
    • cortesoft 4y ago
      Chinese companies have been stealing IP like this for decades, and companies are still doing R&D, so clearly it hasn’t stopped anything yet.
• Someone1234 4y ago
  > If you look at the tear down from the first couple gen, the PCB and components were exactly the same compared to Neatos. I'm interested, please link to that.
  • syntaxing 4y ago
    Just look at the tear down videos on the XV11 compared the any roborock tear down. I would link you the XV11hacking site but seems like it’s down. It had everything from firmware to schematics that hobbyist did in the early 2010s since it was the cheapest way to get a 2D LiDAR (pulling it from a the vacuum itself).
    • Someone1234 4y ago
      You said they were "exactly the same" circuit boards. You're saying you were able to make that evaluation using multiple tear-down videos that weren't doing a side-by-side?
      • derefr 4y ago
        I'm not the GP poster, but doing a visual comparison, if you've got chips of the same size and shape in the same places, and the same passives in the same places, and the trace routing is also visually the same between them, wouldn't you feel that's pretty definitive?
• endisneigh 4y ago
  All of humanity is copying from each other and building on top of each other. Does it really matter?
  • Invictus0 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • drexlspivey 4y ago
      You mean like USA did in the 1800s? https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
      • syntaxing 4y ago
        You know what the US also had in the 1800s? Slaves. Doesn’t justify for anyone else legalizing slaves in this day and age. That’s why whataboutism is a fallacy. Past history is not a moral argument.
        • saiya-jin 4y ago
          > Past history is not a moral argument. Sure it isn't if it doesn't suit you, very convenient. Yet we live in very world completely and utterly in pure 100% mathematical way defined by only our past. All the crap happened/happening/will happen in middle east and africa? Consequence primarily of european colonialism. Sure we can argue that enough time has passed, entire generations. Yet the places are as fucked up as ever, I would argue even more so. Or you can explain this to germans who as a nation are still traumatized by what their ancestors did in WWII (shows how decent the core/soul of that nation is... imagine russians in similar situation, they would just blatantly lie about it and imprison/disappear anybody saying differently, like ie Katyn massacre). Past is a moral argument, like it or not. It isn't a tool to justify anything and I am not commenting on current topic of intellectual theft (which is a rather pointless tea time effort) but ignoring it won't you any good since you won't be able to grok why people or nations behave as they do.
• bmitc 4y ago
  From what I can tell, Chinese companies will freely steal technology from other countries and companies, which is obviously frustrating and not great, but then they relatively quickly start exceeding the technology they stole, quickly adding features not present in the original products. So it's a bit dangerous for American companies to sit on their heels saying Chinese companies are stealing. Yes, they are, and it's frustrating, but then those Chinese companies add features at a rapid pace that the American companies can seemingly not keep up with.
  • triceratops 4y ago
    > quickly adding features not present in the original products. So it's a bit dangerous for American companies to sit on their heels Why can't American companies study the Chinese products and do the same in turn?
    • vasachi 4y ago
      Do American companies manufacture anything in China? Yes. Do Chinese companies manufacture anything in USA? No. So USA can only watch, while China can actually steal.
      • triceratops 4y ago
        Do you need to see manufacturing processes to steal features? Is it not possible to reverse engineer a lot of it? In the car industry, it's standard practice for every company to buy every model from every other company to study it.
        • vasachi 4y ago
          It still is easier to copy, when you own manufactiring process.
    • hungryhobo 4y ago
      They already do, see facebook/tik tok
• tengbretson 4y ago
  I bet when Neato found out about this they immediately almost moved production to a country with adequate labor protections and IP laws. Almost.
• leadpan2 4y ago
  I was at iRobot for holiday season 2003; 1st gen Roomba was out, MANY of the returns piled up along the hallways of HQ. One day the "director of sales"? walked into the standup meeting like Vince McMahon into the arena and slammed down this robot onto the coffee table that was a pitch-perfect copy of the Roomba, except it was tea green and had more colorful LEDs and sounds. "F this and F that" like we had any ability to stop that from happening. I did the teardown and it was a near-perfect mechanical copy like somebody walked the molds across the street. The PCB was different where they chose cheaper connectors. It was way prettier looking IMO. What they couldn't copy was the logic; the SW/uC was handled through a different chain so unless you literally stole a pile of programmed parts, you'd be on your own. The Roomba development team consoled themselves that the performance of floor coverage of this knock-off was worse than the original...but to be frank, both were only useful under limited circumstances that I found nobody I knew had. I'd have better luck with an old sweep-broom. As an intern, those returns piling up were so they wouldn't get resold elsewhere or scavenged. And there were a LOT of returns; its a complicated design with a LOT of cables and connectors and some marginal components going out of the expected tolerances. One of my jobs was to strip out the batteries, lay these robots out in the back parking lot, and using a pointed steel rod, 'spear-fish' them to render them unusable. To make my work quick I'd aim for the 'brain' - the middle where the case was thin and I'd bust through the microcontroller part of the main PCB. Aim, 'crunch', make sure I 'killed' it, and then fling it into the dumpster. Nearly 20 years on, I fondly remember thinking 'I can't believe I get paid to do this!'
  • TremendousJudge 4y ago
    Wow that last bit sounds like the start of a SF novel about robot uprising. Thanks for sharing your story!
    • make3 4y ago
      they'll come for him first, try him at the Hague :')
      • hinkley 4y ago
• dangus 4y ago
  Reverse engineering is legal, e.g., the Compaq Portable, which was a much better value than the IBM PC.
  • bigtones 4y ago
    That type of engineering that Compaq performed was very specific clean room reverse engineering or clean room design, which is specifically designed as a defense against copyright infringement because it relies on independent creation by going off the specification (in Compaq case the Bios specification) and not the original design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
    • MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Huh? Why wouldn't they have gone off IBM's design? It seems extremely likely they would have had several copies in their 'clean room'.
      • bigtones 4y ago
        Because going off IBM's design would have been illegal. It's one of the most famous and well documented reverse engineering projects ever, and they had no copies of the IBM Bios in their clean room because otherwise it would have been illegal. That's literally what clean room reverse engineering means.
        • MichaelZuo 4y ago
          > 'they had no copies of the IBM Bios in their clean room because otherwise it would have been illegal' According to who?
    • dangus 4y ago
      Right, and that's where I question whether the "clean room" is something that is morally necessary. If it's okay to copy something in the legal way that Compaq did it, why is it not legal to skip the clean room and just copy a design? I don't mean espionage and actual stealing of code/schematics (I don't think many Chinese companies engage in that, contrary to the perception). I mean, the company buys the product, inspects it, then copies it. If Compaq had done that directly, it would have been illegal, but the outcome would have been the same as the clean room design. I question the merits of having that level of copy protection where reverse engineering is only legal in a specific and arbitrarily convoluted way. To me it seems like that idea might encourage monopolies and higher prices for everyone.