What's this about?
Apple has revealed what it calls "shocking evidence" from forensic examination of an ex-employee's MacBook in its lawsuit against OpenAI.
What does forensic examination of a work laptop find?
Everything. A corporate-managed machine keeps far more than users assume: file access timestamps, USB device history, cloud sync logs, Spotlight indexes of deleted files, browser history, and shell history. Trade-secret cases are usually won or lost on this artifact rather than on testimony, because it is contemporaneous and hard to explain away. The word "shocking" is a litigant's characterisation in a filing, and should be read as such.
What's the community saying?
HN 178 points, 132 comments
- The most-upvoted comparison: the ex-Coca-Cola employee who tried to sell the recipe to Pepsi, and Pepsi immediately told Coca-Cola. "Not a good look for OpenAI. They come off as desperate and unprofessional."
- A broader cultural argument: this is the "do it and ask forgiveness later" norm that has been spreading for decades, now at the top of the industry.
- The pointed generalisation: one could argue the entire LLM industry is built on that norm — they ingested society's copyrighted text without asking anyone.
- The counter: IP appropriation has driven a lot of technological progress, from steam engines to routers, and it frequently pays off.