Fun times, fun times. We got a few people fired, but that was about it.
Then, about 2 years after they'd canceled, our support department got a strange email from a user that was having problems. At first, the support rep didn't understand the issue and asked the user for screenshots of the problem. Sure enough, the screen shots looked exactly like our old product, which had been decommissioned over a year prior. It even had our support email address and phone number on it. It turns out the version of the software they developed in-house started by scraping our site, renaming all the .html files to .aspx and then making the dynamic parts be data driven.
When we called them on it, they basically threatened to use lawyers to put us out of business if we pursued the issue, so I guess our management decided to drop it. We did make them change the support email and phone number.
This is why we can't have nice things. Darned lawyers. Can't live with them, can't live without them
As Cardinal Richelieu said[1] about 400 years ago: Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him
1. the attribution of this quote is disputed
There was nothing we'd done as a company that was actionable.
Patent trolls are one example of this - where they may deliberately select weaker defendants (instead of going after the bigco "infringers") so ensure they hold the upper hand in the financial power imbalance.
Some day people will say the same of software engineers.
A lawyer can screw you badly, but if you want to screw a lawyer you need another lawyer. If taken as a category, they never lose.
Really?
His mistake was that he used the company internet connection to upload said source files to something like his personal github or dropbox of the sort, so there were proxy logs of him stealing corporate secrets.
Most people would've gotten their personal-ish data off a corporate laptop with a usb key/harddrive which they probably wouldn't have triggered any alarms.
Most top banks use Citrix technology (or similar virtual desktops) to stream workstations for employees accessing both locally and remotely, so the only way you can get data out is by using your phone to take photos.
While most of such companies actively MITM their HTTPS connections (I wonder whether Google does that - theoretically they are CA so it would be extra easy for them), you could probably get away to uploading said file to any service that is small enough to be unknown to corporate firewall providers (Symantec, etc).
We're talking about reducing a ~$25000 part to ~$2500.
Just seems like a huge risk to save maybe $10k per vehicle (assuming price drops for everyone) for some relatively short time period.
An electrical engineer is also going to see the Uber name and expect Valley idiocy, while being a being a secondary concern for not being softwary enough.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24724602-flash-boys
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/th...
This one broke many laws and needs to go to jail!