Based on the story from Flash Boys, that Goldman engineer was taking something like a couple of megs worth of his own work that was related to various open source projects. But he became the poster boy for stealing trade secrets and an example to be made of.

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 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.

The Flash Boys presentation is not accurate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047068. (Though I don't think you should be sent to prison for a crime like that.)

Banks and similar financial companies are extremely paranoid about data security. Working at one all USB drives were mounter read only unless they were specifically provided by the company and encrypted using provided software. Anywhere you could upload files was blocked as well.

Companies that care about data security typically disable write access on USB ports.

What's to stop someone from sending sensitive data as an attachment via email using an encrypted email service? I don't think a proxy can detect much besides data size correct? I suppose a virtual desktop could log which files are uploaded.

Most email servers reject that (I tried to send something to a Deloitte consultant and gave up after password protecting ZIP file).

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).

It also seems like the least interesting thing to steal. The hard part is probably the software and access to real world driving data. It is like holding up a bank and walking out with just the coins. The risk reward profile is terrible.

I thought waymo's lidar sensors were much, much cheaper than other sensors: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-i...

We're talking about reducing a ~$25000 part to ~$2500.

A factor of 10 and at least 3-4 years of engineering work? Yeah, that's no small potatoes.

That was a result, though, of Google collaborating with Velodyne. I suspect Velodyne would have reduced pricing to everyone as a result. And Google's not the only entity working towards less expensive LiDAR. There's Delphi/Quanergy, etc.

Just seems like a huge risk to save maybe $10k per vehicle (assuming price drops for everyone) for some relatively short time period.

Levandowski allegedly downloaded 14,000 files. The lidar circuit designs, while arguably trivial, are what Waymo can prove have been appropriated.

Discovery will likely find more things, no?

I imagine there are more software people capable of programming their way through the problem than electrical engineers that can work their way through it.

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.

That would be Sergey Aleynikov [0]. I'd recommend reading Flash Boys by Michael Lewis [1], who covers this story in detail. Sergey's case seems much more nuanced, and if I remember, Lewis takes his side on a number of issues.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24724602-flash-boys

...and then after that, do also read Flash Boys: Not So Fast by Peter Kovac. Not necessarily for Aleynikov's case in particular, but because it's healthy to see both sides of the greater narrative that Lewis unfolds.

It's definitely criminal.