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Crime

Former Google Engineer Indicted For Stealing AI Secrets To Aid Chinese Companies 28

Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, has been indicted for stealing trade secrets related to AI to benefit two Chinese companies. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each criminal count. Reuters reports: Ding's indictment was unveiled a little over a year after the Biden administration created an interagency Disruptive Technology Strike Force to help stop advanced technology being acquired by countries such as China and Russia, or potentially threaten national security. "The Justice Department just will not tolerate the theft of our trade secrets and intelligence," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a conference in San Francisco.

According to the indictment, Ding stole detailed information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that lets Google's supercomputing data centers train large AI models through machine learning. The stolen information included details about chips and systems, and software that helps power a supercomputer "capable of executing at the cutting edge of machine learning and AI technology," the indictment said. Google designed some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints to gain an edge over cloud computing rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft, which design their own, and reduce its reliance on chips from Nvidia.

Hired by Google in 2019, Ding allegedly began his thefts three years later, while he was being courted to become chief technology officer for an early-stage Chinese tech company, and by May 2023 had uploaded more than 500 confidential files. The indictment said Ding founded his own technology company that month, and circulated a document to a chat group that said "We have experience with Google's ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it." Google became suspicious of Ding in December 2023 and took away his laptop on Jan. 4, 2024, the day before Ding planned to resign.
A Google spokesperson said: "We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement."
Businesses

Rising Temperatures and Heat Shocks Prompt Job Relocations, Study Finds (techtarget.com) 55

dcblogs writes: A recent study in the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that companies are quietly adapting to rising temperatures by shifting operations from hotter to cooler locations. The researchers analyzed data from 50,000 companies between 2009 and 2020. "To illustrate the economic impact, the researchers found that when a company with equal employment across two counties experiences a heat shock in one county, there is a subsequent 0.7% increase in employment growth in the unaffected county over a three-year horizon," reports TechTarget. "The finding is significant, given that the mean employment growth for the sample of businesses in the study is 2.4%."

Heat shocks are characterized by their severe impact on health, energy grids, and increased fire risks, influencing companies with multiple locations to reconsider their geographical distribution of operations. Despite this trend, states like Arizona and Nevada, which have some of the highest heat-related death tolls, continue to experience rapid business expansion. Experts believe that factors such as labor pool, taxes, and regulations still outweigh environmental climate risks when it comes to business site selection. But heat associated deaths are on the rise. In the Phoenix area alone, it experienced 425 heat related deaths in 2022 and a similar number in 2023 -- record highs for this region.

The study suggests that the implications of climate change on business operations are becoming more apparent. Companies are beginning to evaluate climate risks as part of their regular risk assessment process.

Comment Re:Labor intensive jobs (Score 0) 114

Never mind that the factory jobs that left the US did so because of high labor rates and the only way to get them back and keep them is to pay people competitive wages... for China.

Manufacturing jobs are returning to the US because labor is getting too expensive in China, as Chinese workers want a middle class lifestyle. But the new factories in the US require fewer workers and those workers must possess a college degree, eliminating the vast majority of Trump voters who are eagerly waiting for the 1980's manufacturing jobs to return.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/education/edlife/factory-workers-college-degree-apprenticeships.html

It's clear you are some relative of the owners (daddy is the owner?) of this site. Your posts are the most vacuous, information free, clueless low-IQ millennial drivel I've ever seen. Coupled with your vast experience writing 40 lines of Python code once seems to make you think you know anything about nerds. All your posts get "upvoted" heavily by Daddy, that much is plain and clear. It simply precipitates the end of this site.

Comment Re:i love min wage no benefits and crap hours too (Score 2, Interesting) 114

ummmmmm YOU WILL LIKE IT TOO OR ELSE-----trump

now everyone can has job

You are deeply confused. This was the result of Obamacare. Part-time Low Paying Jobs for Everyone! Because employers could no longer afford healthcare for their workers. Read. Learn. Understand.

Comment Re:Meh... (Score 1) 213

Microsoft's repos *are* that large. That's why they implemented this.

Microsoft Office's repository is over 1 TB in size. Yes, terabyte. For *office*. They absolutely cannot (could not, I suppose now) use Git on it.

It's all that VB.NET, VBA and C++/CLI (bwha!) code smashing around in there. /s

"Real C++, what goes around, comes around again."

Comment Re:WALLED GARDENS (Score 1) 183

Apple only did it on the iPhone/iPad ... Microsoft thought it was a good idea to try to use the same model on PCs.

Microsoft should spend less time trying to imitate Google and Apple poorly.

So MS is heading to be the OS analogue of Firefox. Huh. (As I type this into my "frozen" v.42.0 Firefox browser.) Turns out all these amazing "new idea free-thinkers" in the upper echelons are really just sheep following each other around in an endless circle.

Comment Re:Oh give me a break ... (Score 1) 275

... Elon Musks Massive Mars Flight Presentation and now this. Just because we have better and more realistic computer animation today doesn't make these 'ambitions' any less "new agegy".

It would make more sense to first finish Auroville or[...]

Or hey, how about sending a few people to the Moon, what a concept, maybe for a few days, and then, maybe bringing them back alive. A tall order, but someone has to do it.

Given no one, that's no one, on planet Earth currently has the viable technology to even do that, it makes it all the rest completely ridiculous. As someone commented elsewhere; 'scientists' have become so enamored with shiny computer simulations they are believing them to be real.

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