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
What's really interesting here is the RISC-V architecture and a serious attempt to create competition. Can't steal secrets, but I guess it has not been proven yet. RISC was way ahead of it's time 30 years ago, extremely fast, and RISC OS far superior to the Apple OS in those days. If MicroSoft would have supported RISC financially instead of Apple, the world would have had far more powerful processors and desktop environments. It's interesting how things turn out ... the best technology does not always win.
I feel like all the tech companies take a few secrets from each other. It's weirdly cooperative. There's the notorious year 4 comp cliff, where an oddity in the stock vesting schedule means you get an annual pay cut after 4 years. Coupled with the other place usually offering a higher level than your current one, a lot of people change jobs every few years by default, myself included. I'm not intending to spill secrets, but people do it.
But downloading an unusual amount of data from Apple's repos before leaving is a smoking gun.
But downloading an unusual amount of data from Apple's repos before leaving is a smoking gun.
Not even burn, give it to the shareholders of the company.You'd burn a massive amount of your own money to spite... someone else?
That would really teach them
Also Apple is looking into RISC-V - and it would be very funny to have a standard RISC-V CPU available in the market that blows Apple proprietary thing right out of the water. I mean, the M1/M2 is certainly a cool technology but Apple wants to keep everything closed and locked.
We've seen this often with Apple. So it had problems to hire machine learning experts, cause it wants to keep everything closed. But scientific community and developers want to share their results with the community, create papers and talk about it.
We've seen this often with Apple. So it had problems to hire machine learning experts, cause it wants to keep everything closed. But scientific community and developers want to share their results with the community, create papers and talk about it.
Working at Apple is maybe not as cool as you think. Lots of micro controlling, lots of regulations, marketing department has all the power.
Apple was once a cool company, small teams working hard in a creative kind of way. Look at the story about Ive who left Apple, cause Apple turned into something like a money producing sweatshop.
Apple has patents on nearly everything, their engineers come up with. Therefore it is highly unlikely that a startup would use the content of those documents for their own products. At most, it would make it easier to develop something that doesn't infringe any Apple product.
It's ok when Apple poaches employees but not ok when it happens to them 😂😂
Not what I wrote at all.
I am making the point that proprietary information is not limited to what is written down, and someone who works for a company and throughout that employment they become familiar with proprietary designs and other details of their employers work, will carry that information with them when they change jobs.
That does not mean that they cannot work in the same field, simply that they cannot use information that is proprietary to their previous company in their new job. Take a minute and look up the definition of 'proprietary', it means that such information is owned by their employer. It is not comprehensive to all aspects of work, only those specific details that are unique to the employer and therefore identified as proprietary.
Further, this is a separate point from non-compete clauses that may be present in employment contracts or separation agreements.
Whether or not individuals comply is beside the point. As is whether or not companies chose to enforce these obligations. They are enforceable, it is simply a matter of deciding if pursuing enforcement is worth the time and effort.
except this is a civil suit, until the feds get involved, no one getting prosecuted.
Does that mean then that the knowledge contained within the engineers head is the property of Apple and it can never be used without Apple's permission?
Apple will be going all out on this one. Apple will definitely be not happy about this!!
Perhaps employees need to stop stealing. there will always been employees who think the grass is greener somewhere else. That is just fine. What's not ok, is fertilizing that grass by stealing from your current/former employer.
Someone pointed out in the thread that someone who’s job title is senior CPU implementor is going to need to be able to program ROMs and FPGAs, so they have elevated privileges due to the nature of their work. Likewise, a lot of corporate PCs generally tightly control the granting of elevated privileges, but developers almost always need those privileges. Developers, engineers, and IT personnel pose some of the highest insider risk of any employees, certainly they’re the riskiest and most privileged employees outside of people with President or Chief in their job titles.
Knowledge of another firm’s processes contained in an employee’s head can still be proprietary. If I, as a contractor, use knowledge of internal systems obtained from my current contract in a future contract with a different firm, that’s still considered an inappropriate use of internal information, especially if it allows the second firm to compete with the first or to competitively bid for the first’s business. It’s very similar to regulations concerning insider trading and the public/private sides of the information wall in trading systems.
Hope the sons of bitches go to jail if they are guilty.
Apple has levied a lawsuit against RISC-V startup Rivos, a company that has hired several former high-ranking engineers from Apple. Rivos describes itself as a "startup in stealth mode," and according to Apple, Rivos not only poached Apple employees, but also stole chip trade secrets.
As noted by Reuters, the lawsuit that was filed last Friday accuses Rivos of hiring more than 40 former Apple employees over the course of the past year to work on system-on-chip (SoC) technology that competes with Apple's own A-series and M-series chips.
Apple claims that at least two former engineers (Bhasi Kaithamana and Wen Shih-Chieh, aka "Ricky") took "gigabytes of sensitive SoC specifications and design files" during their last few days working at Apple. Rivos is accused of launching a "coordinated campaign" to target employees with information about Apple's SoC designs.The employees who stole information allegedly used USB drives and AirDrop to offload sensitive Apple material to their own personal devices, as well as stealing presentations on unreleased SoCs and saving it to their cloud accounts. Apple believes that Rivos communicated with some employees through encrypted messaging apps, and the former Apple workers who participated in the theft of information attempted to wipe their Apple devices to try to cover their tracks.
In the lawsuit, Apple said that it had no choice but to sue because of the volume of information taken, the nature of the information stolen, and that the employees are "now performing the same duties for a competitor with ongoing access to some of Apple's most valuable trade secrets."
Kaithamana, one of the specific employees accused of data theft, allegedly copied thousands of Apple documents containing "proprietary and trade secret information" over the course of a week in August 2021. He copied the files on his work computer before transferring them to a USB drive, and Apple's lawsuit goes into detail about the specific data that he collected.
Wen, a second employee that allegedly stole info, transferred 390 gigabytes of data from his Apple-issued computer to a personal hard drive just before departing the company. Apple says that he stole information on both current and unreleased SoCs, accessing proprietary data just before the file transfer.
Other Apple employees not specifically named in the lawsuit also connected external hard drives to their Apple-issued computers shortly after being hired by Rivos, and at the same time, were accessing Apple trade secret information about SoC designs.
Apple is asking for an injunction against the employees who joined Rivos to prevent them from continuing to leak sensitive data, compensation for the loss caused by trade secret misappropriation, and additional damages for "unjust enrichment" Rivos gained from Apple's data. In lieu of damages, Apple is asking for "a reasonable royalty rate" from Rivos. Apple has requested a jury trial, so we are likely to hear more from the Apple v. Rivos dispute going forward.
For those interested, the full lawsuit can be read over on Scribd.
Article Link: Apple Sues SoC Startup Rivos for Poaching Employees and Stealing Trade Secrets
No company in it's right mind poaches and then asks the new employee to steal on their way out. Not that it can't happen but that is an extreme exception as someone that has been in the industry for three decades
Apple's cores are ARM. Taking verilog from an ARM core and applying that code to a RISC-V is a non starter. More applicable would be the idea of a.specific feature such as a cache structure and designing a similar structure for RISC-V let's say.
The lawsuit looks specious because tech companies routinely try to enforce "non-compete" agreements. They aren't worth the paper they are printed on.
Also if it was truly a theft case it would be criminal not civil.
A simulation environment for ARM would be useless for RISC-V.
Also if it's a performance simulator it's going to be very ARM specific.
If It's simulating the actual architecture then the simulator is going to be off the shelf Synopsys, Cadence, etc. The environment and testbench code would not be portable and neither would the tests or instrumentation.
RISC-V is so different than ARM both at an architectural level and system level implementation.
If they did steal all the information claimed, most of it would be useless. Architectural ideas would be more valuable. More of have you thought about this implementation vs that?
I'm not, because I read the article. Many of the things they describe knowing about would be impossible by design of many of services used, regardless of enterprise environment.
For some aspects of the device, yes. Not when they are using personal Apple services, which they did. Read the article.
I did read the article. It says something about “personal cloud accounts”, but “personal cloud accounts” doesn’t necessarily mean iCloud. It could mean Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, etc. Besides, while iMessage is end to end encrypted, I don’t believe iCloud storage is. (Relevant link to an Apple knowledge base article:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303) Additionally, as Apple employees, there may be special details in their employment contract that impacts personal iCloud accounts, and Apple could perform hashing against the content of iCloud accounts to find specific Apple proprietary files.
Unless you’ve got evidence Apple violated their own privacy policy (in a way inconsistent with any addendums contained in the employment contract) re: private iCloud storage, then all you’ve got about privacy is FUD.
Edit: I even made sure and read the linked lawsuit. iCloud does get mentioned, but it seems as though the named employee was accessing his personal iCloud account on the work computer. Another employee apparently offloaded files onto Google Drive. Both iCloud and Google Drive operate on desktops primarily through mirroring local on-disk directories. Browsing through the lawsuit, I didn’t see anything that seemed inconsistent with the use of anti-data-exfiltration tripwires (which could certainly log file system operations).
Last edited:
Re: implementation, it kinda looks like the data gathering was a bit scattershot, the former employees grabbed a lot of different information of different sorts. There may have well been details of future architectural ideas in the stolen information. Furthermore, from a corporate perspective, the differences in architecture are immaterial. If it were Intel apparently soliciting information about Apple’s upcoming roadmap (or proprietary information about its chips), it would still be a competitor receiving a wealth of proprietary information about Apple’s custom processors. (Additionally, Apple’s Mx and Ax series chips include far more than just ARM compute cores. GPU, media acceleration, neural network acceleration, the Secure Enclave, details of its approach to asymmetrical processors. Some of that information would no doubt be applicable or at least transferable to non-ARM architectures.)
Besides, Rivos is a stealth mode startup. While they claim to be working with RISC-V, they could still pivot to ARM or other architectures. It’s not like they’re already putting out chips or like they couldn’t add new product lines (such as ARM) pre-launch.