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How Huawei planned international robot espionage via email
Huawei began building its own phone-testing system, xDeviceRobot, in early 2012. The Chinese company hoped to improve the quality of its mobile hardware, which tended to fail far more often than competitors' devices in third-party trials. In May 2012, Huawei China asked T-Mobile if it could license or flat-out buy the company's phone-testing robot, Tappy, which served as a standard for much of the industry. T-Mobile said no. So, Huawei decided to steal Tappy. After installing a handful of employees at T-Mobile's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, federal prosecutors claim Huawei USA and China employees attempted to illegally collect information on Tappy in a year-long espionage campaign that culminated in actual theft. Huawei was found guilty of misappropriating T-Mobile's Tappy intellectual property in a 2014 civil lawsuit, and federal prosecutors in Seattle this week unsealed an indictment that brings new, criminal charges against the Chinese company.
Why did Tinder just buy a photo-messaging app?
Strangely, for an app that's all about appearances, Tinder has never allowed its users to directly send images to one another. That could be set to change, however, as the dating startup has announced its first-ever acquisition: Tappy, a Snapchat-like app. Tappy launched last summer as a high-concept ephemeral messaging app. To start a conversation in the app, users had to send an image, which would disappear after 24 hours. The idea was that photos would spark conversations, but despite positive reviews, the app never really took off.
