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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

It's not a bigger bombshell than what was already in the news. We know what stealing means. The guy is an engineer at Waymo and plugs a USB stick in a laptop to download 9GB of code. And he hoped to get away with this? I'm pretty sure everyone at Google knew, they were just waiting to time it right.

"Hey, what about now? When Uber is taking fire from all directions?"

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The bigger accusation the article makes is that Levandowski made a deal with Uber to create a startup with Waymo's stolen data, that would later be acquired by Uber.

So Otto was essentially just a vessel for that stolen data, created simply to transfer the IP to Uber. If true, that'd be much bigger and much more damaging than just stealing some files.

It's a much bigger deal if it can be proven that Uber essentially conspired with him to steal the IP. If Uber had prior knowledge, that's a very different thing than just some unscrupulous rogue engineer who wants to get rich.

Doubtful they knew. I'd imagine with these kind of forensics, there is such a glut of data that it is really difficult to proactively monitor it. A post-hoc analysis after they found something fishy seems most likely.

i can't believe someone as smart as he is would just blatantly stick in a usb. With how much money he was going to make he could have researched some more annomous ways to get it. Not the least would be to intercept a team members auth/pw and use that to access the data.

It fits the pattern of most crimes. A whole lot of money and the chance to get it quick tends to drop most people's IQs down an order of magnitude.

He had a Windows laptop according to the filing.

Engineers rarely use windows. He was also a manager at Google. Very techy folk don't take on manager responsibilities because it quickly saps time.

Both those things tell me he was more of a people person than a technical person.

A lot of engineers use Windows, especially in circuit design since a lot of the design tools are only on Windows.

And as a Googler, I can comfortably state that most engineering managers are very technical. I know because I've worked under many of them.

Not to mention that he had to look up how to use SVN.

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