Sounds like Apple needs to up their endpoint security game. I was working in less sensitive environments and people couldn’t -simply connect external harddisks or USB sticks.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Sues SoC Startup Rivos for Poaching Employees and Stealing Trade Secrets
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Steve Jobs would have ruined them over this, not asked for royalties.
Nah, it’s more that it would be almost impossible for the firm to claim that their design is a clean room design now because of the exfiltrated data. It’s a way of letting them stay in business, acknowledging that the design couldn’t really be clean room anymore, and still getting reimbursed by the firm’s profits from the stolen data.
I'm curious what DLP (Data Loss Prevention) Apple is using, since they can see external drives being mounted and AirDrop activity. Or perhaps they are using something in-house that just churns through the Unified Log and sends results back to a SIEM. Some DLP software is also Disaster Recovery like Code42, it both backs up your data and let's employers look for file hashes, it's a win-win! But yeah whatta buncha derps - didn't they watch Super Pumped and see what happened to the Google Engineer that went to work for Uber and took trade secrets with him? Jeez, don't get greedy folks.
I think the reasonable royalty rate Apple is entitled to is 67% of gross sales.
it's called karma apple! welcome to it
Qualcomm engineers are probably interns more than anything given the current state of their chips.
It sounds like Apple wants a reasonable royalty rate as compensation.
I would just purchase the company and then immediately dissolve it out of spite.
Employees moving from opportunity to opportunity is well within their right. Doing what is best for them and their families is a no-brainer. Stealing sensitive data and sharing that with a competitor is illegal. If true, Apple should prosecute.
Last edited:
Regardless this will effectively shut down the company. With the former engineers being held liable the company has lost any IP so backers will be hard to find as they’ll have to start from scratch, if they can, and whatever money they had will be zapped in legal fees win or lose.
They banked hard on those engineers whether they knew about the stolen IP or not and it just bankrupted them.
It shows how naive these employees are. Did they really think just connecting a external drive and performing a copy and paste and Airdrop that none of those actions were being recorded? Apple is the company of paranoid secrecy. I’m sure they are one of the pioneers when it comes to surveillance of work devices and tracking.
Probably impossible for someone holding the title of CPU implementation engineer.
You have to interface with FPGAs at some point.
Hypocritical when, for example, Srouji is from Intel. Apple is just abusing its size to stunt competition and it's not even direct competition since it's RISC-V architecture vs ARM. FTC should investigate and put that demon Cook in prison.
Sounds to be less about the employees, per se, and more about the IP they allegedly took with them. Two different issues.
nonsense, for one, a lot of the former Intel modem engineers were based in San Diego when Apple acquired them, and secondly, the "center" of the RF design world is in San Diego, so yes, a lot of different companies are based there and talent movement is a normal event ...
so it's ok to take trade secrets with you when you change companies? Think again ...
Last edited:
apple doesn't own a prison nor do they have jurisdiction, this is a civil matter and thus no criminal charges would be brought worth.
Knowledge inside someone's head belongs to them.
Knowledge on a company-issued computer belongs to the company.
Poaching in and of itself is not necessarily bad. People are free to choose who they work for. But coordinating or incentivizing the theft of information from another company is bad news.
It could potentially lead to criminal investigations and criminal charges, so we can’t rule that out, but yes, as it stands, this is a civil action and not a criminal action, so there won’t be jail time from this. (Honestly, white collar crime is typically hard to get serious jail time for, if just because most white collar criminals likely couldn’t survive stints in anything but minimum security jail. It also helps that they’re not viewed as a violence risk, unlike, say, someone in jail for burglary and/or assault, let alone sexual assault or murder).