Due Diligence Report on Otto and Anthony Levandowski
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1/12/2016 Internet search on "how to securely delete files mac"
1/13/2016 Ron leaves Google
1/19/2016 Internet search on "can a MacBook be recovered after formatting the OS"
3/22/2016 A file labelled Chauffer win plan.docx is deleted, shortly before Ron's interview with Stroz Friedberg
"Chauffer win plan.docx" is this guy serious? Did he name his other incriminating file "if they find this im fucked.pdf"
As with all security, threat models are key. Is your threat model a state actor trying to reveal something about you? Is it a prosecutor or investigator that is particularly vicious? Is it someone you're in a personal relationship with? Is it an unknown adversary with unknown capabilities? And how long do you need to have your strong OPSEC? And so on. With the right threat model and timeline laid out, having strong OPSEC is not impossible. But it's still quite hard.
All of that being said, I would not classify any aspect of Levandowski's behaviour as being passable as OPSEC.
Google will never find out what you do on your home PC, especially using TOR /some other engine (Google displays the captcha often on TOR). Even if they did, it would be illegal and /or super secret and they'd never reveal it in court. Now, if shady means that NSA is after you, not so sure.
However, if you want to steal from Google and use their computer to search their search engine from their office...I guess you deserve to get caught. Let's not forget that Google has a right to safeguard their trade secrets and when you accept the job, you agree to their terms.
yes, one of many ways to get 'anonymous' internet, another is cash buying old cable modem, even unprovisioned they still log into cmts and give you dns access(hint hint)
>and download a Tor browser
no, you go swap meet/yard sale/goodwill/craigslist(using library computer) and cash buy old used($100) working laptop with preinstalled windows
Thankfully that’s not how law works. Also, I use Tor everyday, for totally legal things I want to keep private.
Once an attacker knows or has guessed at your identity, they can focus their investigation and make it much easier to find admissible evidence against you. It's best to keep them from ever thinking of you in the first place, if you can. That means not doing anything visibly suspicious.
Although ironically I think in this case your point actually still stands.
Not sure any of this tech was used by or on behalf of the company creating this document though.
Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586 (Feb 2017)
> tajen How does Google build such forsenics? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718970
> bitL: Alphabet just [...] revealed what they track internally to all their employees | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719728
Though I am not sure if it is just collates data from MacOs logs or does some kind of deep analysis to pull data.
Here's what the report says: "Levandowski also attempted to empty the Trash bin on his MacBook Pro while he was at Stroz Friedberg's office... but our examination found no files were contained in his Trash at the time he attempted to empty it."
Is this even possible? You can't "attempt" to empty a trash with no files in it from the GUI. The menu item is disabled. So that would suggest a terminal command, but supposedly there's no command line equivalent for "empty the trash".[2] You can of course delete specific files or folders, but then they'd say he'd try to do that, not "empty the trash bin".
The only user action that I can think of that would constitute "attempt to empty an empty trash" is hitting the keyboard shortcut for it (shift-command-delete). But is that even logged on a standard macOS installation?
The report references "Exhibit 17" for more detailed forensic analysis. I would be very interested in reading that.
[1] There's still a command line option but it may not work correctly with Flash storage, which is why it was removed from the GUI. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205267
[2] https://www.imore.com/how-force-empty-trash-your-mac-using-t...
50K Project Chauffeur emails stored on his personal laptop. People have gone to jail for less.
> Levandowski also attempted to empty the Trash bin on his MacBook Pro while he was at Stroz Friedberg's office on March 22, 2016 at approximately 12:12 p.m., but our examination found no files were contained in his Trash at the time he attempted to empty it.
What kind of company does business with a shady character like this?
A company that was already doing shady things?
Like in a mafia trial, the "snitch" is no angel, but that's the one that offered to d the deed. So, IMO, Uber wanted the stolen tech and the only person that gave them to them was ...drum roll. They would have bought them even from KGB. So, if you want stolen tech, you'll have to deal with a thief and then some.
Do you want your self driving cars or not?
On my Mac the option is greyed out. Perhaps he ran a command or delegated a utility to do it for him.
Mods: you might want to overrule the post and retitle the post as Project Unicorn Investigation.
In fact, I'd love to see the due diligence report for Uber buying Otto.
There is such a thing as 'vendor due diligence' where a party that will sell something does their own DD in preparation to the DD by others to ensure they haven't missed anything obvious.
Other than that you are right though, this is an investigative report, but it would have been a lot smarter of Uber to have this stuff checked before making a deal, the optics are not pretty and the fact that they tried to hide this report makes it even less so.
I have seen a couple of these in the last few years that were 'exciting', this one is off the scale for me on a professional interest level, there are only three that I'd like to read more, the actual due diligence reports - if they exist - on this deal, Ubeam and Theranos.
Could be that when you're hustlin', making bold bets and being optimistic leaders[1], you don't get too concerned about (or read) a report like this.
1. https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural-values
> At one point, Levandowski said that he asked Brian McClendon, who left Google to join Uber, how much Uber would be willing to pay for the Chauffeur team, claiming he wanted to have a market value for the team
Ie it's more "I'll make it so you can buy the Chaffeur team" rather than "I'll let you buy these design docs that are Waymo confidential".
At this point, it doesn't matter if they took Waymo's files or not, just the appearance of something like this to happen reflects poorly on them.
let's get [this] done! but, it is legal? no, it's mostly borderline towards full blown illegal. ok, make sure you empty the trash on your Mac before we get started.
But also, yikes! My next phone will have 256GB of storage, how much stuff is going to accumulate in there, and really we have to hand this over for inspection by the company? I think the one part about the drives filled with porn they didn't want to inspect, by then it was really creepy.
The fact this document is in the public record. Just wow.
Always interesting seeing company employees not using their company's products. Shows that what some view as a monolith is a bunch of smaller bands of people.
Does that make it feel more like he was intentionally storing company files in a personal account?
(Or that's how it was when I worked there until 2016.)
The only thing I know google uses google docs for is coding interviews. Which is just sad.
At the very least it implies that they're naively unaware of a lot of their user stories.
Google executives don't care about formatting; the vast majority of them are technical, and culturally Google basically has a "don't care about superficial stuff, you have bigger problems to worry about" attitude. And the idea that you might want to print something out is a terrible anachronism; the whole reason we have multi-exabyte datacenters is so you never have to deal with paper again.
It's not naivete, it's arrogance. Basically Google wants to see you move into the 21st century, and if you don't, that's your problem, you'll eventually be forced to because the rest of Google's feature set is so good. Same reason IE support is pretty shitty on a lot of their products.
The only two real gaffes I can think of that really were naivete were the sound on the PacMan doodle, and the lack of privacy controls on Google Buzz. It basically never occurred to Googlers that you might get in trouble for having sound blaring out of your work computer (this, BTW, is my fault, I did the code review for the sound on the Pacman doodle), or that you might get in trouble because your boss knows about stuff you do on your personal time.
...but yeah, it would never have occurred to me that people would get in trouble for the mic drop April Fools joke. It's a different culture in tech, in Silicon Valley, and particularly at Google. I remember being told by a senior engineer that as long as I continued to do my work, there was basically nothing I could say to a senior executive that would get me fired.
For example, I don't think I've printed a document in a decade, except when dealing with dinosaurs like govt or banks, which my team didn't deal with.
re tab-aligned things, are you using explicit tab stops or not?
I used LaTeX for a while, but that randomly has tiny little issues that are seemingly impossible to solve. Try coloring the background of a table cell. It will cut off 1 pixel of the cell border on the top and left of the cell, regardless of the zoom level. If you zoom out enough, the border disappears. If you zoom in enough, its almost impossible to notice. It's infuriating. And the most commonly accepted answer online? Get rid of your cell borders, your table will look better.
Word is Word. Haven't used it seriously in so long I can't properly critique it.
Unfortunately there are some things you still have to print for (or at least convert to pdf). Most of the time, you can't turn in a google doc. For most companies, they don't want you emailing them a google doc. I don't need a ton of features, I just need consistent presentation of content.
The issue with the tabs is that the length of non-tab content changes a tiny bit when you change zoom levels. If that change goes past the start of a tab, suddenly a tiny change turns into an entire tab. Explicit tabs would probably fix that, but there's no point in trying, considering many tiny little issues like that there are.
It seems I'm wrong about them dogfooding. Apparently they just don't give a shit about these issues.
That seems fishy to me.
If Lewandowski had an inkling of the trouble he was getting himself into, he would have done a lot of things differently. But he didn't. He was going to go start something awesome, damn the lawyers, full speed ahead. Many of the greatest founders in the Valley got their start by either backstabbing or frontrunning their employers. If you're hoping to follow in their footsteps, it's easy for survivorship bias to take hold.
Waymo/Google have claimed that Levandowski was negotiating with Uber to steal their secret stuff well in advance of leaving Google, met Uber executives during this time, and following his meeting with them, stole a bunch of files (a big SVN checkout of their hardware repo). He also did a bunch of other bad stuff that I'm not going to get into. They've also claimed to have evidence that Uber was using their IP through some stolen boards.
The pre-trial case has been really, really bad looking for Levandowski, but Waymo's been having trouble finding a smoking gun to implicate Uber as a whole.
However, one of the key pieces of evidence here was a due-diligence report prepared by Stroz Friedberg that went into exactly what info Levandowski still had from Waymo/Google. Uber and Levandowski, ESPECIALLY Levandowski have been fighting really hard to prevent Waymo from getting it's hands on the report - going all the way up to the Federal Circuit Appeals court. They lost all of these, and the report was handed over a few weeks ago.
This is that report. As to how big of a smoking gun it is... I'm still reading. Waymo's been claiming it is in their filings up through last week, but I haven't been able to see anything past that - something's up with either PACER or RECAP and there aren't any updates/filings on the case in over a week on RECAP for some reason. (If anyone's got a pacer account...)
I'd be curious to know what's the most procedurally complex trial out there. I.e. One where the distance between the original suit, and the issue at hand has the most steps. I.e original suit spawned a separate suit on the admissibility of evidence which got escalated and then spawned another suit on the procedural ... etc
"Levandowski mysteriously quit his job at Waymo in January 2016 (back when it was still part of Google) and went off to start Otto. Then, a few months later, Uber bought Otto, a fledgling startup that had just launched. Fast forward to this February, and Waymo accused Uber of orchestrating the entire thing to get its hands on thousands of confidential documents Levandowski downloaded before his departure."
From my understanding they bought a functioning truck prototype, corresponding IP's AND the team.
2016-01-26 - Levandowski's last day at Google
2016-02-22 - iMessage chatter directly between Levandowski and Kalanick about poaching more Google employees
That certainly paints the "acquisition" of Ottomotto in August 2016 in a different light, no? It's also shown in the document that Levandowski was meeting with Kalanick and other Uber execs as early as June 2015, though it's harder to divine what was happening at that time.
sounds like various code of conduct, policies, etc. is for small, rank-and-file, guys only :)
From what I've seen of slack it retains a lot of history (even if you're on the free plan where you can only see a limited amount, the archives are still there), so you'd think would be an interesting source of data for this kind of investigation.