Qualcomm accuses Apple of giving its chip secrets to Intel

2. Qualcomm is unquestionably more dodgy than Apple. They have been convicted of market abuse and have engaged in anti-competitive practices for quite some time now. I don't think anyone should feel sympathy for them.

3. You have made unfounded allegations that Apple lied to countries around the world. So I would question your bias in this case.

Amazon is far more at fault with ebook price fixing than Apple ever was.

Sadly, at this point, this is par for the course for any corporation. This is simply what they do. It comes with the territory.

These types of discussions always devolve into this whataboutism that really is a bottomless pit. Ultimately corporations must engage in unethical behaviors as they are incentivized to. I bet qualcomm's closet is just as full of skeletons.

Won't change until the US and China start governing corporations properly.

On February 28, 2017, Qualcomm requested an audit under the MSA. To date, despite Qualcomm’s repeated requests, Apple has refused to permit Qualcomm to audit Apple’s compliance with the provisions of the MSA. Qualcomm seeks specific performance of Apple’s obligations under the MSA to provide sufficient information to Qualcomm to confirm that Apple has at all times complied with its obligations related to Qualcomm’s software.

Those, if true, are not going to go well in a court. The section gets worse and worse the farther you read.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/is-the-mobile-reception...

There are also problems that tend to come up again and again, even in different systems, like stuff related to caching, power management etc.

Here[0] is an example from Windows Vista.

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060330-31/?p=...

[1]https://www.slashgear.com/qualcomms-cmo-anand-chandrasekher-... [2]https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/09/05/intel-ce...

No. Generally this is trade secret territory.

> Almost everything in hardware can be reverse engineered,

Not in time to get a RE'd product to market before it's obsolete. We are talking about very, very complex designs.

That's easier to do with simple digital chips (but not so easy). That's completely different story with mixed-signal.

https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-judge-approves-415-mill...

This is incredibly naive and pretty obviously wrong; a lot of big names have gone to jail for fraud and conspiracy, despite being brilliant and having all the money they could spend to protect them. We need look no further than the front page of any newspaper to discover the latest large-scale effort to deceive.

1. Incentive (i.e. Intel tech is cheaper than Qualcomm, but worse).

2. Pressure (i.e. lower the BOM because we're selling 10 million of these a month)

3. Lack of effective oversight.

FWIW I also differ on the statement "deceit is rare". I think ~10% of people will lie if it makes them look better short term, and ~1% will lie aggressively i.e. fraud or relationship aggression. When there is a job with a big incentive for deceit and inadequate oversight it will filter in favor of the liars.

Of course this particular case could be flimsy, all these companies are suing each other all the time, it is impossible to tell what is actually going on.

This assertion is blatantly unrealistic, and purposedly ignores the fact that industrial espionage is widespread and politics drive most business strategies.

I bet there are nice holes for insiders (be they emps, partners, offshore, etc.), to get access and exfiltrate if they were so inclined.

Often it’s only legal repercussions which keep this from happening more often.

And, yet, we have the example of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. I'm involved in the same industry, and know how little it would take to fudge the emissions test results. Yet the company was, in fact, active in a widespread conspiracy to defraud regulators and auditors. And THEN we find out that A LOT of other people and companies were doing the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal.

None of this particularly surprises me. It's clear the industry allowed themselves to get trampled by grandstanding politicians, who passed emissions laws that are almost too restrictive to adhere to. The only way to do it is to spend exorbitant amounts of money on aftertreatment systems. This may have been the government's goal all along, as a "voluntary carbon tax," but it's clear that the only place you can make these expensive additions to the product package is in heavy trucks; NOT in passenger cars.

The longer I live, the more I attribute to malice. When you strive to correct the ignorance, but the behavior doesn't change... what are you left with?

I can say that in many cultures both in the US, Germany, Korea, Russia, and China (in what order?) such deceit is expected and considered normal business practice. If you sit and talk with both engineers and business leaders they will be fairly open about it (and concerned about their comoetitors). It may not be long term efficient, but it is definitely short term profitable. Conspiracies based on profit (like the Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe hiring collusion) are not more rare than CEOs getting caught discussing them on email.

A counter quote from Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

"Even" is not the right word there. It's precisely as organizations grow in size that deceit and conspiracy start to become commonplace. For instance speaking of Apple and Google, they (along with Adobe and Intel) secretly conspired in an unlawful agreement to keep wages low by agreeing to never compete for each others' employees. In the end they ended up getting a firm slap on the wrist to the tune of $415 million. [1] Great ethics there.

In practice Hanlon's Razor is not very useful. Many large corporations, certainly including Google, do engage in malicious behavior. But they invariably ensure there is some form of plausible deniability to minimize the worst case outcomes. And that plausible deniability is often connected to some form of plausible ineptitude or behavior they were supposedly not complicit in, let alone directing. Because of this tendency Hanlon's Razor would end up being, "Never believe a large corporation would do anything malicious."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Yeah, I mean imagine if Apple had a track record of leading a multi-company effort to illegally suppress staff salaries. Could never happen.

That's probably not going to help much, even if it is true.