This seems to be a extra verbose version of "Inverted Pyramid" which is a common writing style when you want to get across the main point as quickly as possible, and then towards the middle/bottom of the article, it's mostly just information/context around the main point. But this article is a bit too extreme in repetitiveness I think.
It's not just for padding. Something like it would be done in newspapers, where I think the idea was that you would choose how far to read based on how much detail you wanted.
Not just how far to read, but when articles on syndicated, other publishers can trim off less important details from the bottom. Less of an issue these days with unlimited space compared to printed papers.
French antitrust enforcers raided the offices of a business suspected of engaging in “anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector,” targeting a company that the Wall Street Journal identified as Nvidia Corp
The move suggests Nvidia’s dominant role in supplying chips for artificial intelligence tasks is coming under closer scrutiny.
Eh, this is more a case of the competitors failing than nVidia abusing their market position. Maybe if AMD and Intel put more effort into making their drivers not suck for AI they could sell millions of cards too.
I realize it's hard to sympathize with AWS as a victim, but any monopolist like nVidia leveraging its monopoly in one sector (AI chips) to gain a monopoly in another is the kind of antitrust violation that is precisely what competition authorities are made to investigate.
There are queues for H100 and everybody wants to buy them. How should they solve the allocation problem? They can also pull out of the market and sell elsewhere comfortably without any crazy bureaucrats harassing them because some French company/branch lost a bid and overestimated its importance to nVidia.
Those monopolist allocation issues usually involve legal cpunsle, cannot be based on sales price or competition, cannot be used to corner markets and so on. In the end, everyone should get an equal haircut, and nobody shoupd be able to jump the line. Classic issue in anti-trust.
Source: Had some intense months discussing exactly such kind of situation. Hence I know it is absolutely solveable, but there are always people who just cannot accept to follow rules and accept constraints, which usually leads to some penalties down the line.
> Eh, this is more a case of the competitors failing than nVidia abusing their market position.
Supposedly, but usually stable governments don't do raid on publicly traded companies on a whim, so maybe there is more to the story we don't know about yet?
I don't know if France is the top industrial espionage offender. TBH, I doubt it. But yes, it has been well documented that my home country is very pro-active with industrial espionage. If you understand french I recommend the Spécial Investigation documentary "Espions privés: barbouze 2.0".
However, linking the raid of Nvidia's offices to industrial espionage is a fantasy. It's well known that:
• French companies mostly spy on their French competitors (Renault spies on PSA and vice-versa)
• France mostly, if not exclusively, spies in sectors they can compete or are trying to compete. (Aerospace, Car, Pharma, ...)
Nvidia is not a French company and has no french competitors. France doesn't have a tech sector. So your conspiracy theory is very unlikely. STMicroelectronics has no interest or ability to manufacture GPUs.
Well, they do business in France, don't they? So they need to follow French law. Seems in this case, French authorities think they didn't follow French law, so French law enforcement got involved. Seems pretty simple.
No offense, but whenever this claim comes up, the same article from that one guy is quoted, and not much else. If the claim was true, one would think that, in the decade or so since, there would have been countless stories of french embassy personnel expelled, of french students being undercover spies, or of french secret services corrupting civil servants abroad, like there are for Russia or China.
It's a reference to an apocryphal quote attributed to George W. Bush "You can't trust the French. They don't even have a word for entrepreneur". Obviously sarcastic.
There's not much data to back the claim. And given this line you would have to expect a lot of spying going on from any other country in the world than Germany and the USA:
> Germany, the cables said, was trying to develop an optical observation-based satellite spy system with Washington's help despite objections from France, which is leading pan-European efforts in the field with its Helios satellites.
The US slowly pulling Germany away from pan-EU projects like this is genious, from the US perspective. Because without Germany, not a single project in this space (military aerospace, defense and so on) will develop a size that could make as much as dent in the US defense sector and the likes of Lockheed-Martin, Northrop and Raytheon. And thisballowsbthe US to corner the NATO market for military goods, and that market is the biggest in the world.
Germany is an easy target for that, usually we suck at this kind of projects because our requirements management doesn't deserve the name. Just how things like A400M, NH90, Eurofighter, Galileo and Tiger came to be sometimes really puzzles me. There seems to have been a different climate in the 80 through early 90s went it came to that. Ever since, not so much.
> US defense sector and the likes of Lockheed-Martin, Northrop and Raytheon. And thisballowsbthe US to corner the NATO market
German companies hesitance to work on Pan-EU (in reality only French) defense projects is because of a headache the Eurofigher has become, as both France and Germany have different export exemptions plus plenty of French companies are still manufacturing weapons systems to directly compete with French-German projects (eg. Dassault vs Eurofighter, Thales vs Airbus, etc).
Also, the American defense manufacturers don't care to target the EU market as much anymore excluding the F-35 project because indigenous capabilities have caught up and North American procurement still dwarfs what individual European countries could buy and maintain.
Eurofighter, without French participation as they have the Rafale, is actually quite a success. Thales is not really a competitor but rather a supplier of Airbus with some overlap in defense electronics. The Airbus defense electronics have been spun-off to a large extent in the form of Hensoldt so.
You underestimate how much leverage it gives the US of supplying the vast majority of NATO hardware. As ypu said, individual countries. If there are alternative programs to choose from, NH90 comes to mind, all the combined individual defense spending goes the US way. Which is quite nice, isn't it?
They are suggesting that anti-trust is an excuse to perform industrial espionage. France is, however, also the top anti-trust and pro-consumer enforcer in the EU, which in many sectors leads the world in consumer protection regulations. There is no reason to assume it was done for industrial espionage reasons, especially as NVIDIA France is explicitly already a French company producing these AI chips.
Ah, all those poor, prosecuted tech giants and multi-nationals... I'll shed I tear for them when I have time, or not. Explicitly including all former, current and potentially future employers. All of which raked in at least 10s of millions of anti-trust and other non-compliance fines, in some cases reaching billions.
Don't do the crime if you don't have the dime, I guess.
The idea that only tech giants and multi-nationals get access to high-end AI accelerators is the main problem IMO.
Nvidia keeps private individuals and hobbyists from access to affordable GPUs that can be used for machine learning by intentionally gimping the available memory in their consumer cards.
Sounds like 'we (French/Europeans) should get off our asses and build our own AI infra, twenty years ago' and instead grasp at straws whining that distribution of resources in very high demand by a for-profit American company is unfair.
I see the lack of will around SiPearl, or the sad state of e.g. Kalray, and I say we deserve our place in the queue. No serious sustained ambition there. Or maybe We're betting on scrapiness and ingenuity and that once the LLM-740B-parameters dust settles, we'll find frugal alternatives...
> Germany, the cables said, was trying to develop an optical observation-based satellite spy system with Washington's help despite objections from France, which is leading pan-European efforts in the field with its Helios satellites.
That's not serious, c'mon
Here is serious one:
Industrial Espionage + Anti-Competitive Practice + IP Theft, all of that facilitated by US's spying network + US extraterritoriality law
- France loosing Alcatel (article in french [1])
- Alstom forced to sell its Energy department (patents, including nuclear) to the US's G.E (article in french [2], book[3], itw [4])
In theory they are trained to avoid the workers to lock their sessions. I think they can’t do anything if it’s locked anyway but most workers are not loyal enough to their employer to risk being prosecuted for hindering an ongoing investigation.
Most workers aren’t involved in anything bad so most of them will not hide proof.
So business could train employees to do that immidiately when a raid happens, they could even run training sessions (like a fire alarm training where everyone has to pretend it's a real fire, or doesn't even know it's not real), but that would probably raise red flags.
Hidding information is seen as obstruction, usually illegal in itself, and shows intend behind whatever illegal and anti-trust violations happened... No idea why this is so hard to understand...
If an unknown entity bursts violently into your office, locking your computer seems a very reasonable security precaution to take.
I would assume the French legal system has methods like most democracies to require a company to retain data and request a copy of that data. We're talking about a corporate office here, not a drug packaging center hidden in the basement of a suburban home where everyone hurries to flush narcotics.
The whole chain of command involved in this could go to jail for obstruction of justice, maybe even conspiracy to defraud the US (depends on the interpretation of fraud).
Uber had a similar setup and used it multiple times. Locking stations when you get up as a matter of policy is smart anyway, but most places don't automate that.
In case of companies, it is easy: get a court order and every corporate counsel not completey on crazy train will turn over whatever authorities ask for.
Legally compel the user of the machine to unlock it. Most people will fold immediately. No one is going to risk jail and a long legal battle for a job.
This. It is a very useful way to get access to unlocked workstations and corporate phones, which allows any city police force to search or access information that a national or foreign court might never allow, or only after a drawn out legal process.
A company I worked for had a few people at each site that had a kill switch that would lock all workstations and lock out all employees at that site. That would prevent the fishing expedition from succeeding.
Similarly, another company I worked for had a company policy that you should physically give up your corporate laptop and phone to customs, but speak to company counsel before giving any sign in credentials. Some countries like to data mine business travelers if they have a beef with the traveller's employer.
Edit: I should point out that every large company should have a rapid response security team. And even if there's no formal system or procedure for a police raid, it would only take a few minutes for that team to decide that they have an obligation to protect the company's data and network. They certainly wouldn't let non-employees sit at a terminal and do whatever they want for hours or days.
A court order, and all the necessary data will be provided anyway. That, and the company in question all of a sudden looks very guilty. As MorganStanley (?) showed us, in these cases absence of documents is considered to be proof the accusations of illegal behavior are true.
Yes, the company would comply with discovery, but it operated in hundreds of jurisdictions, and sometimes those jurisdictions think that kicking in doors and telling the interns that they'll go to prison if they don't give their passwords is easier.
This is especially true if this authority intends to use the fishing expedition to build the case in the first place.
That those jurisdictions are none of the big economies (US, Canada, UK, EU, Japan...). And in most of the others... Well, first I have no idea how anti-trust works there. Second, rules are totally different. Still, hiding evidence from authorities is a sure way to get you int trouble, as a company and as an employee.
Every compliance training I had, covering everything from consumer goods to defense, told you to fully comply with authorities in case of a search. Call legal and site security, stay with the people conducting the search, but fully comply and NEVER try to hide stuff or hinder them in any way, shape or form. That's what legal councils are there for. And courts.
And if those people are wise, they won't do any of that is police and prosecutors are doing the search. The point is to have witnesses of the search present, e.g. to later challenge it in court. You never, ever interfere with a search of premises by police.
What can happen if you do, well, look no further than Mar-a-Lago. because all you do is adding charges of obstruction. But hey, if you think that you know better than legal departments of some of the biggest, and most scrutinized, companies in the western world, sure, go ahead.
Network, data-store and console kill switches aren't necessarily
designed to impede lawful investigations. Anything that involves
physical coercion might need to lock-down all terminals in a
hurry. Acting against a legal seizure is probably not on their minds
but larger orgs may have a fast response security team that can step
in if:
1) An intruder enters the building, maybe armed, and tries to coerce
an individual to do something on a console.
2) An insider threat is discovered and you need to hold the room for
questioning without letting someone slip out the back and delete all
the evidence.
> And even if there's no formal system or procedure for a police raid, it would only take a few minutes for that team to decide that they have an obligation to protect the company's data and network
Are you advocating that employees have the obligation to break the law to protect a business that might be doing illegal things? Are you an employee or an employer?
You misunderstand the law. The police can collect evidence in their jurisdiction. They are free to grab papers, phones, laptops, servers, etc. If the hard drives are encrypted, they can ask a judge to compel decryption, after presenting evidence and subject to rebuttal by legal counsel.
What the police often want to do is an extra-legal search of materials outside their jurisdiction, i.e. in the cloud, in remote servers, etc. I would posit that this is almost always the case, since raiding any tech company would otherwise yield a few printouts and a stack of encrypted laptops.
> Are you advocating that employees have the obligation to break the law
Absolutely not. The IT employee is probably several time zones away, and is just securing assets not on-site. His team mate will probably provide discovery if/when the police actually request things through a court process. The staff on site should cooperate, whether or not their cooperation has been rendered moot.
You aren't suggesting that the police should be able to sit in that office, accessing anything they want on remote servers, indefinitely, right? Why can't the police kick the IT guy's door in and demand an admin login?
> What the police often want to do is an extra-legal search of materials outside their jurisdiction, i.e. in the cloud, in remote servers, etc. I would posit that this is almost always the case, since raiding any tech company would otherwise yield a few printouts and a stack of encrypted laptops.
Ok, my advice to anyone reading this is that if you find yourself in this situation, help the police get as much information they can about it. Nobody should get in the middle of law enforcers business for a wage, don't risk yourself.
> You aren't suggesting that the police should be able to sit in that office, accessing anything they want on remote servers, indefinitely, right? Why can't the police kick the IT guy's door in and demand an admin login?
I'm suggesting that if you create/operate a kill switch you might go to jail and it will be for a wage, something that a competent tech person can get anywhere, probably with a better work life balance than a place that is under risk of police raid.
You would be suprised by the amount of stuff kept on paper in many offices. Especially by those doing shady things, such as aggressive tax optimization.
Having everything online also means that you're at risk of being hacked, whereas if it's in a locked room, you have a lot more control over who accesses the sensitive data.
By the way, people in Germany said the same thing when the VW emission scandal broke, and was prosecuted, in the US about US car makers. The argument was redicilous in both cases.
And almost all of them ended up either moving to the US and/or employed by a large US tech organisation. No one is claiming the people from the EU aren't super smart, talented and innovative, just that the EU does a terrible job at of fostering and nurturing that.
I mean fostering and nurturing any reason at all for these people (and people like them) to stay in the EU and not work for US based "exploitative mega corporations". Why do so many EU citizens see working for (or trying to start) a US based "exploitative mega corporations" the best way to achieve their tech goals.
What is the French alternative to NVidia? Some Raspberry Pi 2-level of GPU? Wouldn't NVidia France be just marketing & sales operation anyway? Are they going to fine NVidia next for creating and dominating the AI market due to ineptitude of its competitors? Are they hoping to get more discounts that way?
Same reason Intel had to oay up, abuse of market position. The problem is not having a dominant market position, the problem is abusing it. In case of nVidia, there is enough to justify anbinvestigation, and search warrant, into potential abuse. Whether or not this is true will be decided in courts, maybe some 10 years from now.
How is nVidia abusing its market position when there is literally no alternative on the market? Intel was objectively hindering AMD but nVidia couldn't care less about AMD or any other competitor. Could you please cite something concrete instead of general hand-wavy "we will find something" arguments?
Anti-trust investigators looked into it, found enough to justify an investigation and got a search warrant. Whether or not nVidia did something illegal will be shown and decided in court.
That is how a legal system is supposed to work, and quite the oppossite of "we will find something"...
The program was regarded as an anti-consumer practice due to the fact that partnering companies were required to remove their gaming branding from all non-Nvidia graphics cards,[11] hurting consumer choice. Reportedly in response to these restrictions, manufacturers began releasing new brands for the competing AMD Radeon products.
Well, there is the little detail of France being part of the EU with the same anti-trust rules. No idea why people think companies can just easily exit a market so, that hurts the top line and no one likes that. Also, nVidia has quite a market when it comes to automotive for example, pretty sure they don't want to loose that.
Is there a name or term for this writing style? All I know it's related to padding when you don't really have any information.