Apple Factory Thefts: Secret Tunnels, Hidden Crawl Spaces
theinformation.com
theinformation.com
While I did not deal with Apple specifically, I did however deal with another major mobile phone corporation — at that time — and i’m sure most of you have heard of them: Research In Motion, RIM, BlackBerry, etc.
This was during a time, my guess is 2008-2010, when forums, unreleased product leaks, and blogs were a very big business and leaks were lucrative to everybody. As a BlackBerry user myself, I found myself spending a lot of time in the old Crackberry.com forums, which happen to have a lot of RIM employees, insiders, and also black market dealers. I’ve soon found myself in contact with people who were passing me (!) information — just an anonymous forum poster.
After a while, I’ve gained the trust of some of my sources and things started to get a little different. Instead of just information, I was getting files of unreleased BlackBerry OS for products that weren’t even released at the time. [0]
Eventually I was given the opportunity to gain access to unreleased devices. Without mentioning any specifics, just in case, let’s just say these phones were like hot potatoes. If you were lucky, the device PIN hasn’t been blacklisted — meaning no BBM, service, your phone is now a brick — by RIM after they notice its missing. How long it’d continue working for was a mystery. Some would go for weeks, others would be dead by the time it arrived in the main. The one thing you wanted to look for? The “Property of Research in Motion Limited” sticker on the back. [1]
But to get back to it’s relevance, I would sometimes learn from the sellers how these phones got out of the building without being noticed and there were a few ways.
1. Metal detectors and x-ray machines: In some areas, employees would have their bags and body scanned by security and this was one of the easiest, yet terrifying option of getting products out of the building. Along side the x-ray machine, there would be a gap between that and the wall. When you walk up to put your stuff down on the belt, just slide the phone down the side and grab it on the other side. With this you’re only doing 1 phone at a time.
2. Windows: Some of them would open so all you had to do was open the window and .. drop the phone down into the bush below. Pick it up after work and nobody can check.
3. Retailers: As with anything, it’s not what you know but who you know. If you’re becoming friends with your manufactures rep, you can get easy access to some gems. Mind you this was all being done in Canada so these phones were being handed around like drugs.
4. Self smuggling: They would just stick phones, shells, etc. in their pants and try to walk out without alerting security and/or bypassing it.
Granted this all was before security tightened up and well before RIMs eventual downfall. While some of it may seem far fetched, let me tell you one thing: if you’re going to deal in unreleased phones, don’t use their phones built-in messaging system (BBM) to conduct business.. Because a nice fella from the security team at RIM will give you a call on your personal cell phone one late night and tell you that they know what you’re doing and to stop it.
So I stopped that night.
— [0]: RIM was notorious with changing product code ames and they also had multiple numbering schemes for GSM, CDMA, or international models (ie os v9.5 for 9200 would be the GSM version but v9.5 for a 9220 is the CDMA version).
[1]: https://recombu-content.imgix.net/app/uploads/13578-M11755-1...
I don't know if anyone else has this reaction, but I find this to be a great alternative to the litigiousness that is normally reported.
> So I stopped that night.
...and good on you for allowing "not suing" to be a successful option. (I'm taking no position on the behavior BEFORE you got caught, but once you were, you didn't "force" them into more extreme options)
Nope! I still remain happy to see that something gets stopped without legal action, and seeing a company that didn't go for the throat succeeding in their defense.
Just because a wrong isn't righted doesn't mean we can't be happy the situation didn't get worse.
Sometimes, the best approach is "Yo, can you cut that out?"
I'm not sure I would, depending on what you mean.
Would I be more upset about someone conspiring to harm an individual as opposed to taking investigative actions that MIGHT harm a company by spreading information? Yes.
Would I feel that someone stopping their conspiracy to steal my phone when I caught them and called them out wasn't enough? Probably not. There was bad, it was stopped, that's still a good ending.
Would I be nervous that whoever was so conspiring wouldn't just stop when asked? Yes, admittedly. But that doesn't mean that harsher punishments actually fix that.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-br...
UPDATE: found a site that has more background on RNS and the mp3 scene history -- https://www.mp3scene.info/groups/22/rns/
In any case, I told my manager what happened and things moved on. A couple years later I got a call from a police officer who wanted me to give a statement and possibly testify in court; they had a suspect. Eventually, I think they took a plea deal or just pleaded guilty and so I didn't end up going to court.
I didn't, but it made me realise how improbable it is that these companies actually manage to keep stuff so secret.
I bet there are hundreds of people reading HN right now who are keeping quiet about stuff that would be explosive if made public. Quite impressive really.
It was made precisely clear what the damages would be if script details leaked out prematurely, and they would be enumerated in dollars and the figure was incredibly large.
Multiple-commas large. At least two, possibly 3.
The project team toiled for nearly a year behind a locked door, we couldn't discuss a single piece of the project with them until the premiere date.
https://torrentfreak.com/man-leaked-revenant-online-fined-1-...
In which buildings? Surely (at least vendor specific) codenames are necessary for basic communication. I was affected when a partner team was sidelined by an Apple contract. It was a fireable offense to say <codename> was Apple or leak it, but you could use <codename> internally to indicate that you had mandated commitments and may not meet partnership goals.
I joined about 6 months after release of iPad but a lot of Apple OS X and iOS consulting was done by folks in the company.
From iTunes to the original Apple Store app there were small, sometimes single person, teams assisting Apple writing this software day in and day out.
They barely reported to anyone, and barely discussed their work. Just clocked full-time consulting hours on behalf the company.
My Blackberry Is Not Working!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI
One reference that may not be familiar to all viewers: when the sketch was made in 2010, Orange was a popular UK mobile carrier.
Enjoy!
Apple broke up the supply chain (and probably not a small number of bones) for the time being in China, but it will grow back. The money is too tempting.
One of the huge economic benefits of standardized, lockable, shipping containers is that rates of products "walking away" on the dock dropped dramatically.
Shipping companies used to just expect a certain % loss from outright theft from dockworkers. Indeed it was considered to be "one of the perks of the job."
> Also I'm fully willing to believe that US authorities would prosecute the crap out of someone stealing from Apple, whereas in China the penalty seems to be that you lose your crappy sweatshop job and have to walk across the street to get a new one.
Assuming the person gets caught, or that they are worth prosecuting. Individual factory line workers, not so much. Throwing a minimum wage worker[1] in jail is a minimal deterrent giving to the potential financial upside. People higher up can just get industry black listed, the community of people making high end consumer electronics is rather very small. (The number of people working on CE is in the tens of thousands+, but the key senior engineers who "make things happen" are fewer in number, and tend to move around a lot between the big players.)
It can be even worse when a partner company leaks. If there are only two suppliers who can provide a part (not uncommon) then you cannot blacklist a supplier who leaked for very long, you'll have to come back around and do business with them again sooner or later, or just accept paying whatever price the other supplier wants to charge.
[1] A lot of electronics factory jobs are not crappy sweat shop jobs, many of the workers are trained technicians who work hand in hand with American engineers to build products. If you ever do manufacturing in China you'll run into the problem of after Chinese New Year the workers will want to bargain to come back to work, or they'll take their skills to another factory that will pay better. The idea that Chinese workers are unskilled trained drones needs to go away.
You've never worked at a FedEx or UPS hub. Everything gets x-ray going in and out, you go through metal detector in and out, no open containers/phones/electronics/watches etc you can have a wedding band and only a wedding band. When stuff does go missing from a hub/sort facility, the carrier often finds the thief very quickly because everything is constantly being scanned and you know exactly where it last was and where it should have gone next and exactly what people are in that area so you can go right to the appropriate cameras with a known, relatively narrow, time frame.
Doing similar in a factory is trivial and there's going to be a lot less risk of the middle/upper management/security being corruptable. No offense to a random Chinese citizen but, the pay is garbage - a quick google query shows the average factory worker salary equates to $255 to $283. If you can walk out with a prototype of something, I bet you could have it sold within an hour for $1000 with minimal effort and if you were remotely organized could probably fetch several times that within a day. You may have just made several years salary to divide among 2-5 people.
In the United States, someone is going to have a hard time getting it in the hands of competition and at best they might get a grand or two from a less-than-reputable website/media company which isn't worth being fired for and/or facing criminal prosecution.
Now compare that to minimum wage in the United States which would be 4x (and then some) what the Chinese factory worker is making and, every factory job I've ever seen pays well more than minimum wage here (a quick Glassdoor search shoes 'The national average salary for a Factory Worker is $39,719', more than 10x a Chinese worker). Making an American worker far less inclined to risk termination and prison.
And in the case of the article, it mentions an individual stealing thousands of casings. You just aren't going to get enough money out of that to make it worth it for multiple American workers to try and smuggle thousands of units out of a factory, the risk to reward ratio just isn't going to work but at a dollar each and only 1000 units a Chinese worker is walking away with 3 months and change of salary.
Some are, some aren’t. Assembly line workers are far from being technicians, but factories have/need technicians as well. It’s the lower skilled assembly line workers who are migrants from the countryside and who will often switch jobs after CNY; the technicians can job hop as well, but being from the cities they aren’t as fixated around the new year to do it.
Big payoffs are a universal temptation, but the definition of “big” depends on your salary. The article says workers “can earn an amount equivalent to a year’s salary for stealing iPhone enclosures”; that would require more money in the U.S. or Europe.
Probably still going to need them. The person responsible for ripping and leaking nearly every big album of the aughts before their official releases was in the U.S.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-br...
Unless I wildly misunderstand something, I'm pretty sure Apple could not produce X amount of devices at Y quality + rate for Z dollars in the US or Europe.
<<--The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products."
.............. .............. Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. “The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.” -->>
The real question is if the pain of switching over is worth it. Do these extraordinary costs in security and shipping outweigh the increased labor costs and potential for unionization in the US? Trump's tariffs might actually affect this calculation as well, but their long term stability is questionable, especially if you're looking 10 years out past the end of his term.
While I would do the same in Apple and Samsung's position, I am worried about the effects of durable secrecy on the sustainability of our society and markets. Markets need competition, and societies need public domain knowledge. If somehow a critical supplier is eliminated there would be no way for a new entrant to fill the gap quickly since all the critical knowledge is secret and centralized.
Of course that system doesn't really work as intended anymore.
Secrets of iPhone manufacturing isn’t something that should be considered worthy of the public domain. Nothing is stopping a competitor from developing their own knowledge and processes. You don’t have to steal to compete.
1. The knowledge is created by people working for the company. Both the people and the company are part of a broader society, and all (people, company, society) have an interest in keeping the ability to manufacture alive.
2. Reinventing everything from scratch while risking submarine patents is wasteful, especially for processes that are obsolete from the view of the original company.
3. The same secrets that go into making an iPhone go into making everything else. I'm not interested in exact dimensions and features being public before release, but I am interested in the general know-how of precision design and assembly being preserved in a way that can outlive the original company.
4. We have lost significant manufacturing capability before. Nobody knows how to recreate the Saturn V rocket. SpaceX, NASA, and others have to recreate that knowledge at high cost. Society at large has a greater interest in preventing this kind of technological regress than in preserving the secrets of one company indefinitely.
Practically, knowledge belongs to anyone who has it.
There may be benefits to setting up cooperative rules about how people can use it. But even in societies with capitalism-friendly approaches, there are cases where knowledge is recognized as a kind of temporary property (say, patents) and yet everyone may have access. There are reasons for that.
Secrets are a different kind of protection. You can try to keep them, and perhaps you even have incentives to do so. This creates an interesting set of incentives for others trying to find out, as well as for those who know to defect (depending on the legal framework and reach).
https://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/viceblog/64645854tunnel...
Doing secret work for a ruthless criminal gang must be risky.
Throwaway for obvious reasons.
Apple mandates that Foxconn worker's worker's wear uniforms with the only pockets on the knees. The goal is to minimize the perception of inappropriate touching during pat downs. Apple also mandates that exit security have a dedicated lane for female workers to be wanded by female guards.
What about underwear?
https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2014/07/22/tsa-travel-tips-pregnant...
https://gist.github.com/eugenekolo/81c1e7ff1c699cfbb584fdd6b...
However, the query string on this link bypasses the paywall for this specific article:
?pu=hackernews11vvpt&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock
The submitter's profile says "Director of Growth @ The Information". They've been submitting The Information articles to HN for the last couple of weeks with paywall bypasses to try to attract new subscribers.
It's good content, but it's also definitely advertising. Is that a problem? I'm not sure, this is a pretty unusual situation.
There's obviously upside to having more eyeballs on our content.
As part of the operation some leaks can be genuine so the press have full confidence in the PR operation, with it always providing them with tid-bits of speculation.
Who knows, Apple could have such an operation going already, unlikely though.
Microsoft did a similar thing during the early OS wars when they just announced they would be doing something without necessarily doing it. This killed off the incentive for competitors to enter the marketspace. Apple could do a similar thing with phone features.