TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

It's always worth remembering there's exactly one reason Excel is abused -- IT isn't giving "non-developers" access to tools they need to automate their work.

Roko's Basilisk or whatever it is should more properly be called Excel's Visual Basicilisk - once Excel becomes self-aware it is going to punish everyone who tortured it for decades.

It just sounds like Mail Merge to me. Which if you were using a computer for work in the 90s, you might know something about. (It was also convoluted) :)

Maybe we need an IOCCC or Demoscene for Excel

https://excel-esports.com/

I'm sure the free GUI is the gateway drug, but at this point practically everybody in finance uses Excel. You can pass files and scripts around and be pretty confident that the external auditor will be able to use them.

where else can you run vba these days?

The product I oversee at my job is something that can only be built by people who are intimately aware of the process and have a strong understanding of the underlying engineering.

We could hand the full project file to a competitor and they almost certainly would not be able to build functional units. The failure points are fractal, so you need a strong intuition about what part you are installing, what qualities an ideal part has, what qualities the one in your hand has, how you might install it differently because of those qualities, and/or how you might change a later process to accommodate it. Or if the part should just be junked. The process is fraught with seemingly good intuitions that will ultimately lead you to failure as well.

These units also cannot be reworked, reused, or repaired, so any mistake before finalizing the build junks the entire thing.

For extremely low-entropy products, mother nature is incredibly unforgiving.

A relative of mine worked at a medical devices company (brain sensors). She told me how small intricacies of the manufacturing process were critical to reach good enough yield or functioning devices, at all. The critical process steps were closely guarded and only a handful employees knew how to do them. The devil is often in the details - and the moat, too.

> Just knowing how the thing is built doesn't seem to be enough.

See perhaps:

> Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge is knowledge that is difficult to extract or articulate—as opposed to conceptualized, formalized, codified, or explicit knowledge—and is therefore more difficult to convey to others through verbalization or writing. Examples of this include individual wisdom, experience, insight, motor skill, and intuition.[1] An example of "explicit" information that can be recorded, conveyed, and understood by the recipient is the knowledge that London is in the United Kingdom. Speaking a language, riding a bicycle, kneading dough, playing an instrument, or designing and operating sophisticated machinery, on the other hand, all require a variety of knowledge that is difficult or impossible to transfer to other people and is not always known "explicitly," even by skilled practitioners.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

Or for analogy, following a recipe doesn't make you a good cook.

Are P&W and Rolls Royce the only companies in the world capable of manufacturing high-end jet engines end-to-end?

We don’t have sensors that can grok the full building process that deep human experts have.

Which Comac? I thought they all used GE (CFM for Comac 919) or Russian/Chinese sourced engines.

I can't remember but I think Lance Air or Epic got split in a sale and a company bought the type design/blueprints but ran into issues actually manufacturing from them.

There is a very nice chapter in the somewhat dated but classic book Business Adventures [1] on trade-secrets and what happens when employees of one company move to another. In chapter 11, "A man, his knowledge, and his job", there is a story of a "space-suit" manufacturer Goodrich suing an employee for moving to its rival Latex for stealing trade-secrets. The story is timely in context of Meta hiring researchers from open-ai, deepmind etc for 100s of millions for the knowledge in their heads of the recipes which work for making superior LLMs - the knowledge of which is empirical and may take years to discover.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-St...

I would say the main element of their success is not really in any specific close kept secrets - its in actually committing to reusable rockets and keep working until they had a working system.

While there are some really nice components and clever ideas (Merlin/Raptor engines & very good guidance tech) this all really has been doable for decades in less efficient form.

But so far no one other than Space X has been able to win against all the naysayers who were so sure only single use rockets are ever going to work, get enough funding to build a partial RLV & then operate it successfully as a business.

I don't think it depends on any single technology or a set of them only they have access to - rather that they have been able to persist and see it through, unlike all the other RLV projects that never got funding to go past the paper stage or very simply not viable (Space shuttle).

So, this is admittedly a little tinfoil, but I wouldn't be surprised if Musk is happy for some degree of espionage to happen. If it looked like there was a possibility of China getting this capability first, it would light a fire under the US government to give financial and regulatory assistance to the Starship program.

Spacex rocketry tech is subject to ITAR regulations. That restricts who they’re allowed to contract with, data encryption and handling, but altogether those regulations are quite bare. It likely wouldn’t be enough to stop a state actor or rogue employees.

Lots of space technology is classified as weapons subject to export control. ITAR has plenty of rules about who can see information. US immigration status generally has to be green card or citizen, and country of origin and any second citizenships are considered.

("export control" in this sense really doesn't have to do with moving a physical object out of the country but sharing information, to the extent that a conversation in an elevator could be an export violation. most export violations amount to emails being sent to the wrong person)

When I worked briefly in defense, for example, there would be regular random searches of my stuff as I exited the building and security would wander the building and look at what you left out on your desk while you went to lunch. Entirely seriously they told us not to wear our badge in public if we left the building and not to leave our laptops in our cars because someone might follow us and steal it. Had colleagues who were visiting a foreign country for work have their hotel rooms obviously thoroughly and messily searched while they were out.

They also do national security missions so there are folks there with high clearances.

Thing is that even if you did steal a bunch of information, that doesn't mean you could just copy and be successful. Any one of a million things can go wrong with a self-landing rocket that will cause it to explode, you can't just steal the whole system of operation that keeps these things from happening.

You couldn't steal all of the secrets of a circus performer and suddenly be able to juggle chainsaws while riding a unicycle.

I imagine SpaceX having pretty fishbowl conference rooms for customers in the center of everything, with guest network ports just segmented off from the main but using the same hardware. Oh man that would stress me out if I was IT. And of course the '<Customer name> needs to print something off and needs access to the MFCs'. No, you print it out for them, like has been discussed and agreed to and keeps with ITAR. 'No, they need access, and now. Because I'm a sales guy and I won't tell them no' but if they get into/past the MFC, it's all on IT and IT being bad at their job/security, not the sales guy that demanded they get physical access.

[dead]

I don't think what SpaceX is doing is that hard to replicate. There's already competitors launching smaller payloads for smaller costs per weight. Just a matter of time until they creep into SpaceX's market, while SpaceX tries to build a starship inspired by the Futurama rocket.

am i crazy for not caring if a company in a foreign country obtains trade secrets and manufactures the same thing? like we're all humans and we all want access to whatever it is they're building, it seems like more people building the thing is a good thing. if that impacts Samsung's profits, why do I care? its not like corporations give a shit about me

We are doing much better off with the status quo than TSMC firing everyone who isn't of the same religion, and even then, it's not hard for a spy to pretend to be <insert religion here>.

> groups have to return to more traditional forms of trust (family, religion, creed, etc)

a relevant acronym is MICE (money, ideology, compromise/coercion, ego). Religion would fall under ideology.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterintelligence

This is such a bad idea.

idk which shocking, Japanese company try to steal TSMC or IBM have 2nm process out of nowhere

We can make hypersonic missiles.

I still want to get a look at China's. Right down to the metallurgy.

> since Rapidus 2nm process is from IBM

Unless it has great yields with 0 issues, there's always things to learn from. It's also possible the IBM process isn't what it seems and there's more to it.

I meant that plugging in a thumb drive and downloading the company jewels is sure to be noticed. I was hoping for something a tad more clandestine. USB storage devices on my corporate laptop are auto mounted as read only and need policy exceptions to be able to write.

TSMC practices compartmentalization. The entire recipe is never stored in one place.