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AMD accuses former top employees of stealing

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AnandThenMan said:
If they are found not guilty, but Nvidia believes they are guilty, then yes they should be let go.

Honestly if I was running Nvidia, I would not want such people around. The only way I would keep them if by some crazy circumstances these people were actually innocent, but I highly doubt that is the case. Which is why, even if they get off by a technicality or whatever, you can't trust such people to stay on with the company. They could burn you just like they burned their former employer.

BTW, reading the restraining order, it even lists specific hardware including the serial numbers that must be preserved! These guys will have their first court appearance Jan 17.
Click to expand...
In civil litigation they don't use the terms guilty or not guilty, rather liable or not liable. A jury finds for the Plaintiff or for the Defendants. Also the standard of proof in civil litigation is "by a preponderance of the evidence" instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt" which is the criminal standard.
 
You're right of course, thanks for the correction. If these people are indeed found liable, it once again proves that very smart people sometimes do really stupid things. Why would anyone risk their careers, not to mention possible jail time if this becomes a criminal matter, and do something like this? Unreal.
 
I should add, i'm definitely no expert on any of this, just armchair ebacking..

[edit] 😛
I wonder how the talks went behind doors before this went public. It seems a cut and dry case of libel so the settlement proposed must be fairly large or NV would have chosen that path to try and avoid the exposure.
 
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piesquared said:
I should add, i'm definitely no expert on any of this, just armchair ebacking..

[edit] 😛
I wonder how the talks went behind doors before this went public. It seems a cut and dry case of libel so the settlement proposed must be fairly large or NV would have chosen that path to try and avoid the exposure.
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LOL, How about AMD being embarrassed about a vice president committing immoral corporate espionage? I mean the evidence is damming, they had to Google how to copy and paste documents!
 
notty22 said:
LOL, How about AMD being embarrassed about a vice president committing immoral corporate espionage? I mean the evidence is damming, they had to Google how to copy and paste documents!
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True, but it's a bit more embarrassing for NV to turn around and hire the same guy.. :|
 
I could see where this would be the result of one rogue (but high-placed) Nvidia employee who thought he was being sly in getting both AMD employees to jump ship as well as bringing competitive info with them.

When I worked at TI there was this one co-worker of mine who was from Samsung, a bright fellow who had uncompromising business ethics.

But another co-worker of mine had less than stellar business ethics, and for a while anytime we had some kind of R&D issue the co-worker who had questionable ethics would interrupt meetings (group meetings mind you, this wasn't even closed door peer pressure type tactics) and call out the ex-Samsung guy and ask him point-blank if he had seen anything like "problem xyz" at Samsung and if he could give us some "hints" as to how to solve it.

This royally pissed off the ex-Samsung guy, I mean nothing made him more red-faced and stiff-lipped than being asked to to betray his ethics and fellow countrymen (he was S.Korean) for the sake of making his fellow coworker's jobs easier for that day.

The ex-samsung engineer never once yielded, and always staunchly refused to divulge samsung info to the TI team, and the TI team got royally pissed at this one TI engineer who kept pestering the ex-Samsung engineer. Eventually the "rogue" TI engineer got the hint and stopped asking, but we had all the less respect for the TI guy in a professional sense (and all the more for the ex-Samsung guy, who we knew we could trust with our secrets because even if he went elsewhere in the future he wasn't going to divuldge them).

But this was one of those cases where this lone TI engineer could have placed TI at great liability had the ex-Samsung engineer not had the scruples he had. If the ex-Samsung engineer was "game" to telling samsung secrets then it would have been a whole other type of an issue...and not because of some deep conspiracy by TI management or something of that sort.

I do believe in the "rogue employee" explanation for things like this, including price collusion (OMG the stories there D:, and it is always a regional phenomenon)...not that it could only be a rogue employee, sure it could be some well-orchestrated plan to extract info from AMD but the odds are that it wasn't.

I've seen individuals take it upon themselves to do some career-killing boneheaded moves, thinking they were helping the company when in reality they were putting a huge liability on it.
 
Manoo Desai worked at NVidia then was recruited by AMD and is now
back to NVidia....

Anyway , not only they downloaded files with info about the coming products
but even tried to have access to infos for wich they werent authorized to access...
 
^^
Yea I can see a mid-level guy thinking this will push him to the top floor.
I would REALLY hope the top exe's would have no part in this. Same as when someone tried to sell pepsi the Coke formula pepsi call the FBI right away. If anyone at the top of nvida even knew about this, let alone had part, and did not report it right away it will be a mess for them.

It could also be AMD is pressing these guys to settle and give dirt on nvida if they were told/asked to do this and nvida used any of the information.
 
Jimzz said:
^^
Yea I can see a mid-level guy thinking this will push him to the top floor.
I would REALLY hope the top exe's would have no part in this. Same as when someone tried to sell pepsi the Coke formula pepsi call the FBI right away. If anyone at the top of nvida even knew about this, let alone had part, and did not report it right away it will be a mess for them.

It could also be AMD is pressing these guys to settle and give dirt on nvida if they were told/asked to do this and nvida used any of the information.
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It is now 6 months that they are at Nvidia so we can be sure
that they used theses infos for their own sake , thus for Nvidia
benefit , in the projects they are working on.
 
"One of the managers even searched the internet several times for information on how to copy and delete large numbers of documents."

“three highly confidential files - two licensing agreements with significant customers, and a document outlining proposed strategies to AMD's strategic licensing” reports ZDNet.

I imagine AMD is going to try to get some big damage awards slapped on these people. Wonder if they will get a forensic trail that determines whether the license agreements made their way onto Nvidia computers. I'd imagine having confidential documents related to AMD's success in getting into upcoming consoles would be quite beneficial.

Idontcare is onto something, this reads similar to how many collusion and price fixing incidents occur. Small cabals at the VP+immediate subordinates level.
 
The point 20/21/22/23 of the accusation griefs clearly state
that confidential technological work and devellopement of AMD
process and product was copied in an external storage device...

All this just a few time before leaving for a Nvidia seat....
 
Abwx said:
It is now 6 months that they are at Nvidia so we can be sure
that they used theses infos for their own sake , thus for Nvidia
benefit , in the projects they are working on.
Click to expand...

It took AMD 6 months to catch on to the fact that their files were compromised by employees they knew had left to go work for one of their primary competitors 😕 Is their security really that lax, are they really this incompetent when it comes to keeping tabs on file accesses where sensitive and confidential information is involved?

Or did they intentionally wait it out in hopes of giving Nvidia a chance of ending up with the files on their servers somewhere so that they could then claim even bigger damages than they would otherwise have been able to claim had they stopped these dudes at the door on their way out of the AMD office with the external drives in tow?

Taking a page out of Rambus legal tactics?

The guys who did this to AMD are sleazy, no question there, but AMD is either incompetent and ripe for this kind of fraud or they themselves are playing the legal sleazy tactic of baiting the trap and leaving it out there to see what they can catch (and profit from once the trap is sprung).

If such an egregious example as this is really went on for months and months, spanning multiple employees, before it was caught out then there can be no doubt this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the volumes of sensitive information that must have walked out of AMD's doors in the past year with all the layoffs and demoralized zombie employees who have been looking for jobs elsewhere.
 
Idontcare said:
It took AMD 6 months to catch on to the fact that their files were compromised by employees they knew had left to go work for one of their primary competitors 😕 Is their security really that lax, are they really this incompetent when it comes to keeping tabs on file accesses where sensitive and confidential information is involved?

Or did they intentionally wait it out in hopes of giving Nvidia a chance of ending up with the files on their servers somewhere so that they could then claim even bigger damages than they would otherwise have been able to claim had they stopped these dudes at the door on their way out of the AMD office with the external drives in tow?

Taking a page out of Rambus legal tactics?

The guys who did this to AMD are sleazy, no question there, but AMD is either incompetent and ripe for this kind of fraud or they themselves are playing the legal sleazy tactic of baiting the trap and leaving it out there to see what they can catch (and profit from once the trap is sprung).

If such an egregious example as this is really went on for months and months, spanning multiple employees, before it was caught out then there can be no doubt this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the volumes of sensitive information that must have walked out of AMD's doors in the past year with all the layoffs and demoralized zombie employees who have been looking for jobs elsewhere.
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Or they waited in case there were more extremely unethical (allegedly) employees to weed out.
 
Vesku said:
Or they waited in case there were more extremely unethical (allegedly) employees to weed out.
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Then they should have honey-potted those documents with dummy docs containing intentionally false info to mislead and misguide whoever was intending to use them. Subterfuge.

Alas, something tells me AMD is just not operating with a full glass of milk here, no matter how you slice it. 🙁
 
I suspect this case will take a long time to wind out in court. However, to some degree, the filing of these suits and the nature of these allegations do not bode well for these four individuals on a professional level.
 
Idontcare said:
It took AMD 6 months to catch on to the fact that their files were compromised by employees they knew had left to go work for one of their primary competitors 😕 Is their security really that lax, are they really this incompetent when it comes to keeping tabs on file accesses where sensitive and confidential information is involved?

Or did they intentionally wait it out in hopes of giving Nvidia a chance of ending up with the files on their servers somewhere so that they could then claim even bigger damages than they would otherwise have been able to claim had they stopped these dudes at the door on their way out of the AMD office with the external drives in tow?

Taking a page out of Rambus legal tactics?

The guys who did this to AMD are sleazy, no question there, but AMD is either incompetent and ripe for this kind of fraud or they themselves are playing the legal sleazy tactic of baiting the trap and leaving it out there to see what they can catch (and profit from once the trap is sprung).

If such an egregious example as this is really went on for months and months, spanning multiple employees, before it was caught out then there can be no doubt this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the volumes of sensitive information that must have walked out of AMD's doors in the past year with all the layoffs and demoralized zombie employees who have been looking for jobs elsewhere.
Click to expand...
This is an awful lot of speculation, especially the bolded part. There is no doubt "volumes" of sensitive info walked out the door? No doubt? Really? 😵

And let's not even begin to make the suggestion that because AMD was supposedly incompetent in protecting their data (more speculation
), that what was done is somehow diminished. edit - I have to say that the comparison to Rambus is an especially low blow, AMD is hardly known as being a patent troll or taking companies to court for no reason. Disappointing post honestly.
 
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AnandThenMan said:
This is an awful lot of speculation, especially the bolded part. There is no doubt "volumes" of sensitive info walked out the door? No doubt? Really? 😵

And let's not even begin to make the suggestion that because AMD was supposedly incompetent in protecting their data (more speculation
), that what was done is somehow diminished. edit - I have to say that the comparison to Rambus is an especially low blow, AMD is hardly known as being a patent troll or taking companies to court for no reason. Disappointing post honestly.
Click to expand...

Yeesh, someone sure is taking this stuff a little too personal 🙄
 
Painting AMD or any company with such a wide brush seems unfair to me. I'm also confused as to why you chose to characterize the outgoing employees as dishonest, disgruntled zombies that are stealing gigabytes of confidential files. 😕

You're saying that this leak is only the start, and apparently many more people have pilfered files and made off like bandits. Where is this coming from?
 
anybody recall the intel amd lawsuit relating to x86 microcode? IIRC, AMD employees that had worked on and seen the 286 microcode COULD NOT work on the 386. It had to be designed from the ground up in a "clean room" design environment. Did I get that right?

If so, those ex AMD now NVIDIA employees could have tainted NVIDIA's designs.

I could be way off base here.
 
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