
Huawei's attempts to copycat a T-Mobile robot read like a comical spy movie - SirLJ
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-indictment-against-huawei-t-mobile-reads-spy-movie-2019-1
======
hugs
(Disclosure: I make robots for mobile testing.)

I wish more companies realized all the spying and stealing of information
would be unnecessary if they started collaborating on making open source
hardware testing equipment. A robot that taps a screen shouldn't be considered
a super important trade secret.

~~~
jeroenhd
There was a civil lawsuit and Huawei won.

This is probably just part of the general witch hunt the US is undertaking
against Huawei.

~~~
daveguy
Civil suits and criminal suits are separate. I'm not sure if settling a civil
suit can be seen as exonerating for a criminal suit. Standard of proof is
higher for a criminal suit, and civil suits can be settled easily with money.

I don't think witch hunt is the right term, as there was obvious unethical
acts (possibly criminal). Although, it is definitely an escalation and I do
wish there was more communicating through diplomats than through legal
systems.

~~~
mikeash
A classic example: OJ Simpson was found not guilty in his criminal trial, but
was found liable in his civil trial.

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bflesch
If this is factual, it shows a HQ-coordinated push to steal secrets about a
single modified industrial robot. I don't understand why they put up so much
effort for this one machine with questionable impact on their bottom line?

~~~
arcticfox
This is just the one they got caught for, probably.

~~~
jvanderbot
Right. I've heard from friends in telco that Huawei techs would routinely open
server racks during 3am service calls and photograph everything. This was
years ago, but I'm guessing a company wide incentive program wouldn't get
igored by many Huawei techs.

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robomartin
This is ridiculous. It’s a SCARA arm with a touch probe, camera, etc. I have
personally developed such systems to test touch screens for applications
ranging from commercial to aerospace.

As a side thought, this is the kind of thing that is wrong with our patent
system:

Implementation is confused with invention. The USPTO grants patents for things
that any reasonable engineering team would implement given a problem to solve.

Engineering is about problem solving. Not all solutions are inventions. In
fact, I would argue that there are very few true inventions these days and
that the general rate of true inventions should naturally decline over time.

In other words, the threshold for what should constitute a true patentable
invention, given accumulated knowledge, should increase with time.

~~~
redm
I think its human nature for things to seem 'obvious' after the fact, but
creating something novel doesn't require it to be technically challenging.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
I had this reaction to a number of graduate computing courses, the feeling
that given five minutes on the problem (parallelism comes to mind) anyone
would have thought of that approach!

In retrospect, it's clear how much that mentality undervalues what was being
taught in the course. Yeah, the initial approach might be obvious, but so are
plenty more initial approaches. What made it through to the course and was put
down in the textbook are the few initial approaches that actually worked.

/Textbooks should have a long list of attempted approaches that seemed great
and weren't, but no one publishes failures.

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projectramo
This raises so many questions:

1\. How many pictures do you need? It seems they keep sending out pictures and
then they send more people to get more pictures. Is there a lot of additional
value in additional pictures?

2\. How hard is it to reverse engineer tappy? Once you know how it works, I
just assumed that Huawei has more than enough engineering talent to put
together a tappy.

3\. Was there a particular component of tappy that was hard to copy?

4\. If I had to guess, the software that recognizes if the phone screen is on
and working is the secret sauce. Not the mechanical tapping which, although
sophisticated, is presumably copyable.

~~~
ethbro
In answer to #1, I'd assume because Chinese PMs are much the same as PMs
elsewhere.

PM: "Why aren't we done yet?"

Dev: "Umm, we need more photos."

{Cue never ending stream of request for photos}

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b_tterc_p
I raised this in the other thread... that article suggested this incident had
already been litigated in civil courts with Huawei being found guilty.

What is different now and why wasn’t it a bigger deal before?

~~~
latch
Googling says they weren't found to be "willful and malicious" and only
"breach of contract." I guess this new evidence suggest it was willful and
malicious.

Also note that this story doesn't cover the other charges of wire fraud
brought against them.

~~~
tivert
Also, IIRC, the new charges are criminal. The previous case was a civil one.

[https://litigation.findlaw.com/filing-a-lawsuit/civil-
cases-...](https://litigation.findlaw.com/filing-a-lawsuit/civil-cases-vs-
criminal-cases-key-differences.html)

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ConfusedDog
Why would T-Mobile still give one seat to Huawei US engineer for testing after
knowing the company is trying to steal the trade secret...?

~~~
Bartweiss
People elsewhere in the the comments pointed out that Tappy seems to be a
derivative of the open source Tapster robot. So I suppose it's possible that
T-Mobile (or at least the people overseeing the Tappy lab) simply didn't
_care_ very much. They might have objected to photos and long lists of
questions to avoid letting Huawei crib all the challenging parts of their
upgrades, but not have been particularly concerned with whether people saw the
basic functioning of the thing, even knowing they wanted to copy it.

Now, a _very_ cynical idea is that T-Mobile figured Tappy wasn't expensive to
replicate regardless, so the maximum profit lay in indulging Huawei's decision
to commit a trade secrets violation. That would explain giving Huawei
continued access while refusing to answer questions and installing good-faith
safeguards in the lab. There's some circumstantial evidence which could back
this: T-Mobile apparently considered licensing out Tappy, which is what
started the lab-access program at issue here. And TMO did sue Huawei for
"reasonable royalties" on Tappy plus double that in punitive damages, though
all they got were breach of contract damages. If they suspected that Huawei
wouldn't buy an expensive license and could replicate Tappy without espionage
cheaply, then a shot at triple royalties might have sounded like a winning
outcome.

I don't believe that's true here. It'd require probably-illegal coordination
to get T-Mobile staff on the same page, all in the interest of fighting a
lengthy trial to maybe receive damages which would be tough to sustain on
appeal and collect. But laches defenses exist for a reason, and a strategic
delay to collect larger damages is at least an interesting possibility to
consider.

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opless
Did they not have access to youtube?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv69ZxKOFSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv69ZxKOFSw)

~~~
andrenotgiant
Yep - in China they do not have access to youtube.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_China)

~~~
tivert
Even so, I'm sure Huawei provides an uncensored VPN connection to its
engineers to bypass such blocks.

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andrew_
This reads like Benny Hill was in charge of the operation.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
“China asked A.X for detailed measurements of Tappy's robot arm. On May 29,
A.X allegedly walked into T-Mobile's lab, broke off Tappy's arm, and put it
into his bag. When discovered again by T-Mobile, he gave the arm back, but the
damage was done.“

I can hear the theme music.

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intricatus
Reading this makes me want to play Shadowrun. :)

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lamarpye
This whole thing seems so tacky and cheap. It reminds me of a rich old person
holding up the line so he can get his Senior discount and save $1.47. Is
Huawei so poor and T-Mobile charging so much to use the robot?

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xt00
Yea this sounds like some random people back in huawei China were super
curious about this robot and wanted to copy it so they didn’t need to buy from
some company rather than some kind of broad company effort to steal super high
tech stuff. I hope if governments are going to go after huawei they have more
than this pretty lame story..

~~~
jessaustin
Probably lots of firms have committed similar goofiness at some point. Huawei
is criticized for this particular episode because TPTB have approved Huawei as
an acceptable target for our Two Minutes Hate.

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iamleppert
How hard could it be to build? Actually the whole articulated arm thing seems
quite unnecessary to me since you’re dealing with interactions on a flat
plane.

A simple XYZ platform driven by steppers would probably be far easier and more
reliable/reproducible. Throw some OpenCV in with feature tracking and a
database of phone screenshots and some shitty internal web app and...lol

~~~
rtkwe
These robot arms are off the shelf and very repeatable and reliable. They're
used all over the place in automation and assembly every day. What's hard
about using this either the controllers are very good and can be easily
scripted for the whole sequence of test touches T Mobile's engineers wanted.
They're also very fast moving so they can rapidly test across different parts
of the screen.

~~~
Latteland
If they are so easy why was Huawei trying so persistently to steal the
details? This is more irrefutable than the usual info. H might have done a
great job developing their own tech in some areas totally on their own, but
that's not what was happening here.

~~~
tivert
> If they are so easy why was Huawei trying so persistently to steal the
> details?

As someone mentioned upthread, it could just be company culture around how
they value stolen trade secrets vs internally developed know-how. Sort of
like, once upon a time, "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM."

~~~
Latteland
It's not okay to try to steal things (as we probably don't even need to
mention). It's doesn't matter if that is the accepted way to do things in a
company, you are making a moral mistake. I don't want to tar everyone in the
company as being that way, but it would be a serious thing to consider if
someone in Huawei in my town (they have offices in the Seattle area) was
looking for a job.

If you work in a company that has standard cultural practices of stealing
things, then you have to not do it. Of course many companies try to be
aggressive and push the illegal envelope (like say Uber) but you have to be
moral and honest, it's a crucial aspect of the professionalism that we should
have. That's a difficult line that I feel fortunate never to have faced in my
software engineering career. Think about those engineers and leaders at VW who
lied about the 'defeat device'. I would guess they were in some kind of
automotive or mechanical or other professional organization that had a code of
ethics that you couldn't do those things.

