We've heard bits of this before [1] but maybe discovery is confirming some of qualcomm's theories.
> Qualcomm claims it has reason to believe Apple flouted its rules, and cites an incident in which an Apple engineer CC'ed an Intel engineer in a message containing confidential material. The chipmaker also says Apple engineers working with competitive vendors merely obscured references to Qualcomm in messages rather than restricting the flow of protected data.
I've been the point engineer in these types of interactions(over on the GPU space, but still plenty of IP to worry about there).
You're very, very careful to make sure this doesn't happen, up to and including having two discrete teams that work with different vendors to make sure it doesn't happen(sometimes mandated by contracts).
In my last gig where I did this our group was the one part of the company that most vendors came to precisely because we didn't disclose techniques or approaches. Someone just casually mentioning "Vendor X" does Texture Compression with "Y" in discussions is enough to get them to never talk to your engineers again.
(I've seen very senior engineers do this in order to try and move the needle with a vendor only to completely sabotage the whole relationship without even realizing it.)
Not quite the same level but I remember before gen 4 game consoles were announced, for a while the NDA hoops we had to jump through and the care we had to take when discussing them internally was intense. For a long time we just called them "gen4a" and "gen4b" (a legacy that still lives in our code base to this day), and you weren't allowed to verbalise which one was which. This was followed by more code words, so you then had to remember which code name matched up with gen4a and which one was gen4b. SDK and firmware drops were strictly locked down of course, and we had to hide the dev kits when any kind of video crew or photography was taking place around our work areas even though the kits were pretty much unrecognisable and even if it was for an internal purpose (but that's to be expected, anyway). Also you could not stack one particular kit on top of the other one because it was known to overheat faster than a pug in summer.
Oh yeah, I was in gamedev before this and NDA process back then was quite involved. These days with the ability to run on production hardware that's a lot less restricted.
I'd say that SoC vendors are a bit more strict about NDAs vs GameDev where it was pretty wide knowledge who worked on what. Once you were in the industry there were very few secrets given how small it is.
Nah, not sure it really stuck. Both times I saw it they were more interested in being 'technically right' rather than see the trust between companies that they were destroying.
It's interesting because in that environment building trust was sometimes more useful then being the best GPU/perf engineer. I had developed a reputation of not reaching out to the support teams unless it was a problem that I characterized pretty well. I'd uncovered enough driver bugs with one vendor that I was given personal contact info of senior engineers on the vendor's side and told to reach out to them directly in case of any further issues.
That meant I could skip 3-4 levels of support and cut out ~1.5 weeks of back and forth verification of issues. As such I was able to close on actual critical perf/functionality problems much faster than just about anyone else.
Much like you should treat your IT/support staff with a ton of respect(because they never get a shoutout when things go right and always get thrown under the bus when things go wrong), showing you that respect people's time and only raise issues with in depth repros goes a long way. I'd much rather have a collaborative environment like that then resulting to escalating through your account rep/director/vp. Both gets the job done but one will have the other team dragging their feet every step of the way.
Wild speculation but kinda hilarious if Intel asked Apple, "Hey how does design element X work in the existing product?" and Apple said, "Gee, I dunno, let's ask the existing vendor. Hey Qualcomm, how does this part work again?"
That's not too unusual. I worked at a company where we acquired by one of our "partner's" competitors. An engineer sent out an email including some new management from the acquired company, me, and our partner complaining that our partner was no longer responding in a timely manner ;)
You seem to imply Intel and Apple is a person. There are thousands of engineers who work on these products. Are every one of them supposed to be perfect. If legal had to read every engineers email we would get nothing done. I mean there was probably some commands the cpu sent the baseband and I am guessing Apple wanted it to be the same with the intel chip.
I am not sure if that’s how things work out in the end. Usually, all big companies have programs where you need to comply once a year or so (eg by watching training videos and answering some questions on how to write emails). Thus, they can transfer to an extent to the individual
Yeah, and this explanation actually makes the most sense to me. I've seen people do enough similar things to see how someone would do this without thinking about it.
what's up with all these glaring defense of Apple?
Apple's success has been narrowly focused in on designing, marketing, and a few technical areas -- wireless tech pioneered and dominated by the likes of Qualcomm, Ericsson, etc for decades is not where Apple's strength lies.
Further, Apple has been accused and convicted of orchestrating ebooks price-fixing ($450M fine in 2016) and colluding with other tech companies not to poach each others' employees (another $450M fine for all tech companies involved in 2015). A US jury also found Apple willfully infringed VirnetX's IP's (ie, facetime VPN OD). So yeah, sure, Apple, however big or successful, is fully capable of engaging in unethical, anti-competitive/trust, illegal activities to gain advantage over others.
Also, let's not forget, Qualcomm's lawsuit (or counter-suit) is just a small subplot of the greater feud between Apple and the wireless industry. Apple, having challenged the wireless industry for a full decade and lost or settled every lawsuit (and failed to squeeze their wireless suppliers), allegedly colluded with mobile OEMs around the world to launch regulatory attacks against Qualcomm. Sure, there are some aspects of Qualcomm's licensing practices that are clearly illegal/anti-competitive (especially respect to their chipset competitors), but Apple's direct accusation (eg, kickback for exclusivity, violation of FRAND -- unreasonable royalty basis and rates) is probably just blatant lies that Apple fabricated to rile up regulators in South Korea, EU, and Taiwan. It's no wonder that Qualcomm is so pissed off and they are engaged in a bitter lawsuit over frivolous IP theft that Qualcomm would have looked away otherwise.
1. We have no evidence that Apple did anything wrong. And so until a court rules either way we should default to them being innocent.
2. Qualcomm is unquestionably more dodgy than Apple. They have been convicted of market abuse and have engaged in anti-competitive practices for quite some time now. I don't think anyone should feel sympathy for them.
3. You have made unfounded allegations that Apple lied to countries around the world. So I would question your bias in this case.
Qualcomm has been found guilty in two separate antitrust actions recently in the EU, with a third antitrust action getting underway in the last couple of months.
They are currently the subject of another antitrust action in the US.
In addition, several other nations have recently found them guilty in antitrust actions of their own.
Given their behavior, and the Billions in fines they have recently been ordered to pay for said illegal behavior, I'm not certain why anyone would still be willing to accept their claims without proof.
1. Sure, contrary to some views here that Apple is too big, too talented, or too successful to do any wrong (see bsimpson's comment), we do have plenty of historical evidence that Apple is fully "capable" of doing so.
2. Nobody said Qualcomm was a model corporate citizen or too big, talented, or successful to do any wrong. All companies including Apple engage in unethical behavior in pursuit of profit.
3. Wrong, I haven't made any unfounded allegation. I stated Qualcomm alleged Apple made false testimony to regulators around the world; hence their cancellation of rebates that started the US lawsuit. Also, wrt Apple's assertion on Qualcomm's FRAND violation, Apple has made the same empty accusation against all wireless IP holders of FRAND violation with absolutely zero evidence over past 10 years -- Apple hasn't provided any evidence this time around either.
> Further, Apple has been accused and convicted of orchestrating ebooks price-fixing ($450M fine in 2016) and colluding with other tech companies not to poach each others' employees (another $450M fine for all tech companies involved in 2015). A US jury also found Apple willfully infringed VirnetX's IP's (ie, facetime VPN OD). So yeah, sure, Apple, however big or successful, is fully capable of engaging in unethical, anti-competitive/trust, illegal activities to gain advantage over others.
Sadly, at this point, this is par for the course for any corporation. This is simply what they do. It comes with the territory.
These types of discussions always devolve into this whataboutism that really is a bottomless pit. Ultimately corporations must engage in unethical behaviors as they are incentivized to. I bet qualcomm's closet is just as full of skeletons.
Won't change until the US and China start governing corporations properly.
As another example, an Apple engineer working on a competitive vendor’s product asked an Apple engineer working on Qualcomm’s product to request assistance from Qualcomm relating to a downlink decoding summary for carrier aggregation.
On February 28, 2017, Qualcomm requested an audit under the MSA. To date, despite Qualcomm’s repeated requests, Apple has refused to permit Qualcomm to audit Apple’s compliance with the provisions of the MSA. Qualcomm seeks specific performance of Apple’s obligations under the MSA to provide sufficient information to Qualcomm to confirm that Apple has at all times complied with its obligations related to Qualcomm’s software.
Those, if true, are not going to go well in a court. The section gets worse and worse the farther you read.
Ehh, the secrets that were shared really should be public anyway. Qualcomm have single handedly distorted the American mobile device market by working trade secrets and patents into the LTE standard.
I wrote about the KFTC action recently, in which the KFTC fined Qualcomm about $850 million and ordered it to stop its abusive licensing practices. The KFTC found that Qualcomm dominated the pool of essential patents for the CDMA cellular phone standard, and it used those patents to monopolize the market for CDMA chipsets:
It refused to license to competitors, even though as part of the standard-setting process, Qualcomm had committed to license to anyone on fair and reasonable terms
It forced handset companies to separately take a patent license if they wanted to buy Qualcomm chips. That was on top of the purchase price for the chips.
It forced handset companies to give Qualcomm licenses to their own patents, for free.
Similarly, I was expecting the GPU situation to come to a head, meaning : Imagination technologies starting a lawsuit. The fact that this hasn't yet happened, led some commentators to conclude that a confidential Apple-IMG settlement has taken place.
The headline doesn't match this statement, which makes more sense: "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."
The complaint could amount to Apple having characterized the performance of Qualcomm's products in a way Qualcomm believes is not allowed. It is unlikely Apple literally broke into Qualcomm's R&D infrastructure and stole source code.
It's not. There's tons of ISA improvements in AArch64 beyond simple 64b registers/address space that help out, particularly for wide, complex, OoO cores like Apple's.
Assuming there is something that is similar or copied in Intel Chips that came from Qualcomm, isnt it protected by Copyright and Patents already? Besides, Almost everything in hardware can be reverse engineered, there isn't a trade secret than cannot be unravelled just by analysing the output of the chips. Hell Cyrix did just that in the previous century to create better chips than Intel. There isnt a reason why Apple would do something which Intel can do on its own.
> 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"
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!"
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.
> 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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
>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).
>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.
> "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."
> 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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
What does Qualcomm have to gain from making public statements about allegations like this? Isn't it like talking to the police voluntarily, where it could only hurt your position?
Yeah - because a company like Apple doesn't know taking away source code and giving it away to a competitor like Intel is a gross violation of any legal standard out there. And Intel, on their part, would be like sure, give it to us because this is totally cool!
I bet this is a narrative fueled up by Qualcomm vs. any basis in reality. If it is real, then most likely this was done inadvertently.
Yes, Qualcomm is accusing both the Apple and the Intel engineers of wrongdoing. And my money is on their discussion was about some timing or signal format issue that is actually published in a difficult to understand standard somewhere. Which is why an Apple and an Intel engineer thought it was ok to have that discussion with a Qualcomm engineer.
looks like an attempt to direct attention from something else. the quotes read like they were said by politicians running for posts instead of a business commenting on a lawsuit.
Those quotes were run through so many lawyer-filters that I'm surprised any signal actually remains, to be honest. This will be one of those lawsuits that last at least a decade, most likely.
Steve jobs had reiterated multiple times that good artists copy and great artists steal. Apple stole the 'GUI' and 'mouse' from Xerox, constantly violates scores of OS patents held by Microsoft, and now blatantly steals Qualcomm modem code.
Remember when they made a fucking hue and cry over rounded rectangles? The whole $1B with Samsung?
> Qualcomm claims it has reason to believe Apple flouted its rules, and cites an incident in which an Apple engineer CC'ed an Intel engineer in a message containing confidential material. The chipmaker also says Apple engineers working with competitive vendors merely obscured references to Qualcomm in messages rather than restricting the flow of protected data.
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/02/qualcomm_sues_apple...
You're very, very careful to make sure this doesn't happen, up to and including having two discrete teams that work with different vendors to make sure it doesn't happen(sometimes mandated by contracts).
In my last gig where I did this our group was the one part of the company that most vendors came to precisely because we didn't disclose techniques or approaches. Someone just casually mentioning "Vendor X" does Texture Compression with "Y" in discussions is enough to get them to never talk to your engineers again.
(I've seen very senior engineers do this in order to try and move the needle with a vendor only to completely sabotage the whole relationship without even realizing it.)
I'd say that SoC vendors are a bit more strict about NDAs vs GameDev where it was pretty wide knowledge who worked on what. Once you were in the industry there were very few secrets given how small it is.
It's interesting because in that environment building trust was sometimes more useful then being the best GPU/perf engineer. I had developed a reputation of not reaching out to the support teams unless it was a problem that I characterized pretty well. I'd uncovered enough driver bugs with one vendor that I was given personal contact info of senior engineers on the vendor's side and told to reach out to them directly in case of any further issues.
That meant I could skip 3-4 levels of support and cut out ~1.5 weeks of back and forth verification of issues. As such I was able to close on actual critical perf/functionality problems much faster than just about anyone else.
Much like you should treat your IT/support staff with a ton of respect(because they never get a shoutout when things go right and always get thrown under the bus when things go wrong), showing you that respect people's time and only raise issues with in depth repros goes a long way. I'd much rather have a collaborative environment like that then resulting to escalating through your account rep/director/vp. Both gets the job done but one will have the other team dragging their feet every step of the way.
Apple's success has been narrowly focused in on designing, marketing, and a few technical areas -- wireless tech pioneered and dominated by the likes of Qualcomm, Ericsson, etc for decades is not where Apple's strength lies.
Further, Apple has been accused and convicted of orchestrating ebooks price-fixing ($450M fine in 2016) and colluding with other tech companies not to poach each others' employees (another $450M fine for all tech companies involved in 2015). A US jury also found Apple willfully infringed VirnetX's IP's (ie, facetime VPN OD). So yeah, sure, Apple, however big or successful, is fully capable of engaging in unethical, anti-competitive/trust, illegal activities to gain advantage over others.
Also, let's not forget, Qualcomm's lawsuit (or counter-suit) is just a small subplot of the greater feud between Apple and the wireless industry. Apple, having challenged the wireless industry for a full decade and lost or settled every lawsuit (and failed to squeeze their wireless suppliers), allegedly colluded with mobile OEMs around the world to launch regulatory attacks against Qualcomm. Sure, there are some aspects of Qualcomm's licensing practices that are clearly illegal/anti-competitive (especially respect to their chipset competitors), but Apple's direct accusation (eg, kickback for exclusivity, violation of FRAND -- unreasonable royalty basis and rates) is probably just blatant lies that Apple fabricated to rile up regulators in South Korea, EU, and Taiwan. It's no wonder that Qualcomm is so pissed off and they are engaged in a bitter lawsuit over frivolous IP theft that Qualcomm would have looked away otherwise.
2. Qualcomm is unquestionably more dodgy than Apple. They have been convicted of market abuse and have engaged in anti-competitive practices for quite some time now. I don't think anyone should feel sympathy for them.
3. You have made unfounded allegations that Apple lied to countries around the world. So I would question your bias in this case.
They are currently the subject of another antitrust action in the US.
In addition, several other nations have recently found them guilty in antitrust actions of their own.
Given their behavior, and the Billions in fines they have recently been ordered to pay for said illegal behavior, I'm not certain why anyone would still be willing to accept their claims without proof.
2. Nobody said Qualcomm was a model corporate citizen or too big, talented, or successful to do any wrong. All companies including Apple engage in unethical behavior in pursuit of profit.
3. Wrong, I haven't made any unfounded allegation. I stated Qualcomm alleged Apple made false testimony to regulators around the world; hence their cancellation of rebates that started the US lawsuit. Also, wrt Apple's assertion on Qualcomm's FRAND violation, Apple has made the same empty accusation against all wireless IP holders of FRAND violation with absolutely zero evidence over past 10 years -- Apple hasn't provided any evidence this time around either.
Amazon is far more at fault with ebook price fixing than Apple ever was.
Sadly, at this point, this is par for the course for any corporation. This is simply what they do. It comes with the territory.
These types of discussions always devolve into this whataboutism that really is a bottomless pit. Ultimately corporations must engage in unethical behaviors as they are incentivized to. I bet qualcomm's closet is just as full of skeletons.
Won't change until the US and China start governing corporations properly.
On February 28, 2017, Qualcomm requested an audit under the MSA. To date, despite Qualcomm’s repeated requests, Apple has refused to permit Qualcomm to audit Apple’s compliance with the provisions of the MSA. Qualcomm seeks specific performance of Apple’s obligations under the MSA to provide sufficient information to Qualcomm to confirm that Apple has at all times complied with its obligations related to Qualcomm’s software.
Those, if true, are not going to go well in a court. The section gets worse and worse the farther you read.
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/11/qualcomm-antirust-war-...
[1] https://www.wiwavelength.com/2018/09/antennagate-reduxs-if-s...
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/is-the-mobile-reception...
Here[0] is an example from Windows Vista.
[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060330-31/?p=...
There are also problems that tend to come up again and again, even in different systems, like stuff related to caching, power management etc.
The complaint could amount to Apple having characterized the performance of Qualcomm's products in a way Qualcomm believes is not allowed. It is unlikely Apple literally broke into Qualcomm's R&D infrastructure and stole source code.
[1]https://www.slashgear.com/qualcomms-cmo-anand-chandrasekher-... [2]https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/09/05/intel-ce...
No. Generally this is trade secret territory.
> Almost everything in hardware can be reverse engineered,
Not in time to get a RE'd product to market before it's obsolete. We are talking about very, very complex designs.
That's easier to do with simple digital chips (but not so easy). That's completely different story with mixed-signal.
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"
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!"
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.
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.
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?
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-judge-approves-415-mill...
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."
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.
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).
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.
"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_L...
This assertion is blatantly unrealistic, and purposedly ignores the fact that industrial espionage is widespread and politics drive most business strategies.
If one of you could cite some sources, we might actually get somewhere.
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.
Yeah, I mean imagine if Apple had a track record of leading a multi-company effort to illegally suppress staff salaries. Could never happen.
I have a hard time believing that a company with that rigor intentionally steals trade secrets from one vendor and passes them to another.
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?
I bet this is a narrative fueled up by Qualcomm vs. any basis in reality. If it is real, then most likely this was done inadvertently.
That's probably not going to help much, even if it is true.
1. This isn’t the start, it’s been ongoing for over a year
2. Add a few more zeros to that number.
Remember when they made a fucking hue and cry over rounded rectangles? The whole $1B with Samsung?
Fucking hypocrites
Examples: QMI Documentation, DM-Port Tools, drivers for all of their Android phone related stuff.
Qualcomm seems to be aspiring to be the new Rambus.