[HN Gopher] Tesla has used space characters in internal emails t...
___________________________________________________________________
Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify
leaks
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 459 points
Date : 2022-11-16 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Reminds me of the strategy of map companies, that planted tiny
| errors or fictional streets in their maps, so that they can
| identify other map companies, that copied their work.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
| thedanbob wrote:
| There was one of those near my house on our map when I was
| growing up. I though it was just a weird mistake until years
| later when I learned about this concept.
| wmwmwm wrote:
| I love this story about Agloe, New York - a "copyright trap"
| that materialised into a real place:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York
|
| When another map maker put the actual settlement on their maps,
| the original publishers cried foul, but then discovered Agloe
| had become real!
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Agloe is a fictional hamlet
|
| Very fitting, if people weren't sure if it 'be or not be'.
| lalos wrote:
| Agloe anagram of legal
| scubbo wrote:
| Uhh...
| wmwmwm wrote:
| Actually, I think it was the initials of the original
| publishers
| ilamont wrote:
| "A BBC TV show called Map Man, broadcast in 2005, claimed the
| London A-Z contains about 100 trap streets."
|
| https://londonist.com/2015/11/london-trap-streets
|
| Tangential: Are A-Z guides still a thing? I still have my old
| one from many years back when I lived there.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap.
| aix1 wrote:
| The following is only tangentially related, but somewhat
| interesting. For most of its history the USSR systematically
| distorted publicly available maps of the country, misplacing or
| omitting streets and geographical features etc. This was done
| as a security measure, while accurate maps were classified.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-...
|
| In contrast, the classified maps were remarkably detailed:
|
| https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| China has a lot of mapmaking and GPS technology restrictions,
| present day, for supposedly the same reasons.
| sllabres wrote:
| See e.g.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_da
| t...
| mhh__ wrote:
| Soviet maps of the UK are extremely detailed
| mhh__ wrote:
| Companies that sell things in catalogues also do this
| dbatten wrote:
| Google still does this! They seem to use some sort of
| generative neural net to produce fake names, descriptions, and
| even reviews for the trap locations.
|
| You can report the location to Google as "bad data" and they'll
| delete it, but then a totally different fake location will re-
| appear in its place a few days later.
| nix0n wrote:
| I worked once with a contractor who did not have a physical
| location for their business. They simply worked out of a
| minivan which they drove to wherever they were needed. But
| they pretended, to google, yelp, and probably others, to have
| a business location.
| staplung wrote:
| It's called whitespace watermarking and seems to be one of those
| ideas that keeps getting re-invented. It's used a lot,
| particularly in HTML where the rendering hides the identifying
| spaces. It can help you figure out if someone is scrapping your
| content.
| [deleted]
| rcarmo wrote:
| A couple of corporations back, I got fed up with a corporate
| team who re-used my slides "creatively" without attribution and
| added the words "rabid squirrels" in white text to both the
| master slides and a few diagrams.
|
| We used EMC's Team Rooms, and it was quite fun to run a full-
| text search across our tenant a few months later.
| haasted wrote:
| Genius used a similar technique to check whether Google was
| scraping their lyrics. Apostrophes in selected song lyrics
| spelled out "red-handed" in morse code.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/genius-we-caught-google-red-hande...
| no_carrier wrote:
| Interesting... Google caught out Bing stealing search results
| a number of years before that -
| https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-
| copying...
|
| I guess engineers at Google have too short of tenure to
| actually remember the precedent.
| pb7 wrote:
| > Google blames the issue on third-party licensing
| partners. "The lyrics displayed in information boxes on
| Google Search are licensed from a variety of sources and
| are not scraped from sites on the web," the company said in
| a statement.
|
| Did you read the link?
| theCrowing wrote:
| yeah, the biggest case might have been Google vs genius. There
| are also more elaborate things done for documents with a 500
| company we rolled out fonts with slightly different hinting to
| determine in which ring the leaks were happening.
| salawat wrote:
| Non-breaking whitespace/other non-rendered characters can
| disrupt this type of technique. It can also be rendered moot by
| photograph, transcription, paraphrasing, etc...
|
| Hell, even a re-encode/format change, or stripping of format
| info can moot the entire premise.
|
| I welcome Musk to demonstrating his own psychosis/neurosis. It
| doesn't really speak to any fundamental cleverness.
|
| Furthermore, were I a journalist receiving such material, I'd
| damn well make sure to change how I communicated it enough to
| neutralize attempts at such watermarking, simply because I know
| people are pre-disposed to such acts as he did.
|
| In fact, if you're going for maximum Discordian Malcontent high
| score, and you're confident you're operating under such
| scrutiny, neutralize a copy you leak, then carefully
| orchestrate the planting of false trails to keep the spook
| wannabes chasing their tails, which can end up blowing back on
| the orchestrator for waste of resources. This works better with
| a larger team though where Spartacus dynamics start kicking in.
| Sample size 1 tends to leave sufficient metadata from neutral
| parties to rehome in on a common perpetrator.
|
| This is why labor organization scares the living shit out of
| people like Musk, and other large holders of capital/abusive
| management types. Info asymmetry, fear, and disunity are some
| of their most potent weapons.
|
| Wisdom tends to prevail on the side of "don't do shit
| somebody'd find leak worthy, and you won't have this problem".
| greggsy wrote:
| Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80's to help identify who was
| leaking cabinet documents to the press.
|
| I recall a story about Jobs tracking down leakers in his own
| executive suite by telling each of them a slightly different
| things in private. Not sure if it worked, but it can be a very
| effective deterrent.
| amelius wrote:
| > Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80's to help identify who
| was leaking cabinet documents to the press.
|
| Surely the extra whitespace would disappear in the DTP
| systems used by the press?
| egman_ekki wrote:
| They could use typos in different words, though, right?
| 9991 wrote:
| Or synonyms, or alternate grammar that's functionally
| equivalent. Lots of better ways that are completely
| concealed, unless you see multiple drafts.
| onion2k wrote:
| Not if the papers printed photos of the docs.
| thathndude wrote:
| This is why any reputable journalist/leaker takes the
| information and reproduces it prior to any dissemination
| (hopefully destroying the original source material).
| biztos wrote:
| Wouldn't the "leakee" then be able to say you just made
| it up?
| kuschku wrote:
| And this is why the media often can't actually show the
| original sources.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Yes. But they'll say that anyway, even if you publish the
| document in full. This is why a trusted free press
| matters, and why authoritarians work so hard to undermine
| it.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| A trusted _and_ free press huh. In what works of fiction
| can I read about those?
| hedora wrote:
| Any historical text covering media ownership rules in the
| US prior to the mid 90's would cover it.
|
| If it must be fictional, try the original superman.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Fox News is mostly fictional stories about the free
| press.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| See how the Intercept absolutely screwed Reality Winner
| bloak wrote:
| There's also something similar in "The human factor" by
| Graham Greene, a good spy story.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| The trick is actually very, very old. Mapmakers used to add
| very small and intentional "mistakes" to their maps so that
| they could identify who was copying their work (because they
| would copy the mistakes along with all the legit parts of the
| map).
| xdavidliu wrote:
| The Jobs story sounds quite similar to what Tyrion Lannister
| did to identify leaks in Game of Thrones.
|
| https://youtu.be/Di8Z7rJ9vnI
| prepend wrote:
| Tyrions plot has a flaw in that it's three versions of the
| same story. If two or three betray him, he won't know and
| he'll reveal to the queen that something is afoot.
|
| He should have used different stories.
| rocketbop wrote:
| He did use different stories, he tells each one something
| different.
| prepend wrote:
| If Pycelle tells Cersei Dorne and Varys says Greyjoy and
| Littlefinger says Vale then that's a problem as Cersei
| won't act on the information.
|
| It also might make her suspect misinformation as there
| are three different values coming to her at once and
| she'll have to deduce what's more likely that all three
| informants are lying, or misunderstand, or Tyrion fed
| them bad info.
|
| Much more likely to have three independent stories so
| that the traitors will be revealed even if there are
| multiples.
|
| In the current scenario, if Varys and Littlefinger snitch
| then Tyrion won't know because Cersei will hear Greyjoy
| and Vale and not reveal what she knows to Tyrion because
| it conflicts as Myrcella can't be married to two
| different groups.
|
| The better scenario would be something like "Myrcella
| marries Dorne to Pycelle; 1,000 ships sent to Westeros to
| Varys; I'm appointing Jaime as lord of casterly rock"
| then each betrayal could be known.
|
| If Varys and Littlefinger snitch in this scenario Cersei
| will look into ships and casterly rock and reveal the
| betrayers to Tyrion.
| stavros wrote:
| But it's a version of the same story. If the queen hears
| that he's planning to marry Marcella off to Dorne and
| Theon, she'll know that something's up.
| [deleted]
| prepend wrote:
| I worked with someone who would tell me very precise weird
| personal details (eg, "the left side of my mouth can't
| taste").
|
| I found it odd because they weren't really pertinent and
| seemed really unique that I've never heard of anyone else
| with the condition.
|
| I suspected he did this to try to determine who they can
| trust when he would remark that people were liars or not
| trustworthy and one time a coworker told me a completely
| different weird detail about them.
|
| I never got a chance to ask them about this technique before
| we stopped working together.
| david422 wrote:
| So was he like ... hey bud, don't tell anyone this, but ...
| "the left side of my mouth can't taste"
|
| Because I can't figure out how this would be helpful in any
| other context.
| prepend wrote:
| He never said not to tell anyone but he brought up
| several such details while we were working together. The
| information wasn't really helpful for anything in that it
| wasn't relevant to our work (making software).
|
| I never revealed the info because it was said in
| confidence. But we weren't really that close so it stood
| out to me.
|
| My example was made up but the actual factoids were about
| medical issues and bodily functions. It wasn't creepy or
| anything just not something I would want widely known.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| That sounds like a terrible workplace in general.
| prepend wrote:
| Nothing is perfect and there were trade offs. This person
| was really smart so the stuff we made was interesting. I
| wouldn't want to work in that org again but I'd gladly
| work with that individual.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| True.
|
| But also very interesting!
| robby_w_g wrote:
| This comes off more as pathologically lying rather than
| paranoia.
| nailer wrote:
| Likewise Coleen Rooney, a football player's wife, did this to
| unmask a gossip leaker:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagatha_Christie
| simiones wrote:
| It's pretty well known that map makers do this, adding non-
| existent small localities to detect when someone is blindly
| copying their work.
| [deleted]
| adolph wrote:
| Yes, it is a fascinating topic:
|
| _Fictitious or fake entries are deliberately incorrect
| entries in reference works such as dictionaries,
| encyclopedias (including Wikipedia), maps, and directories.
| There are more specific terms for particular kinds of
| fictitious entry, such as Mountweazel, trap street, paper
| town, phantom settlement, and nihilartikel._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
|
| _In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in
| the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside
| the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of
| "trapping" potential plagiarists of the map who, if caught,
| would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap
| street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of
| streets, other "trap" features (such as nonexistent towns,
| or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or
| altered for the same purpose._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
| zikduruqe wrote:
| I used to work in a laboratory where we tested pre-
| production cell phones (this was before the iPhone...).
| Different OEMs would send us sample devices with different
| fonts on the keypad, or with little blemishes on the
| keypad, or would put little subtle cosmetic changes to
| devices to catch leakers.
|
| Funny when you would see devices pop up on the internet
| with these little things, and wonder who lost their
| contracts/jobs/etc/...
|
| When Palm was creating the Pre, we had some security dude
| come to our lab to show us how to securely store,
| transport, test and inventory devices. It was crazy.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| I remember coming across these pirated DVDs etc where
| they had some kind of Academy watermarks from pre release
| or intros that were supposed to be give aways as to the
| source path for smoke testing.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Funnily enough -- I came across a prototype Pantech
| device and I suspect that it's not only disguised for the
| carrier, but also the design and number of the Os could
| help trace its origin.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/134172491386
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Same with dictionary makers, they will insert some credible
| looking made-up words here and there. Wiki page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
| rolph wrote:
| i wonder how many people have died or had life changing
| experiences, because they thought there would be a village,
| but found only rocks and bushes there.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| It definitely caused someone to meet a bad end in "The
| Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron"
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Boris Johnson planned to do it, but bragged in the press
| about the plan before implementing it.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > I recall a story about Jobs tracking down leakers in his
| own executive suite by telling each of them a slightly
| different things in private.
|
| Supposedly, even today, Apple will assign employees
| (especially new ones) fake projects in an effort to weed out
| leakers.
| grishka wrote:
| Good HTML parser libraries follow that part of the spec and
| collapse multiple spaces into one.
| bogomipz wrote:
| Yes and similarly many printers and photo copiers have
| something called MIC - machine identification codes:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
| greyface- wrote:
| Google circa 2011~2012 used unicode homoglyphs in all-employee
| memos for the same purpose.
| notRobot wrote:
| Another comment from this thread backing this up:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33625024
| jonhohle wrote:
| I implemented this at Go Daddy for our internal KB around
| 2006/7 after someone started leaking docs. It was pretty
| reliable, but had some interesting failure modes: not being
| able to search for words with transposed glyphs, excluding code
| listings and other things that might be copy/pasted.
| m2fkxy wrote:
| A variant of the barium meal test, common in espionnage.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| there should be an AI service that rephrases given text
| [deleted]
| tpmx wrote:
| Now do Apple.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| That's genius. Watermarking with odd invisible and collation
| Unicode characters. The only concern is it might be easy to
| defeat with tools to detect Unicode confusables and invisible
| characters.
| praptak wrote:
| Some primers about avoiding the basic mistakes when leaking
| (don't read them from your work laptop obviously. That would be
| the first mistake!):
|
| https://freedom.press/news/sharing-sensitive-leaks-press/
|
| https://mashable.com/article/leaking-hacking-data-nsa-anonym...
| kodah wrote:
| Think that's bad? Check out what Zoom has been up to for years
| surrounding fingerprinting video.
| theknocker wrote:
| zzleeper wrote:
| From Wikipedia:
|
| After a series of leaks at Tesla Motors in 2008, CEO Elon Musk
| reportedly sent slightly different versions of an e-mail to each
| employee in an attempt to reveal potential leakers. The e-mail
| was disguised as a request to employees to sign a new non-
| disclosure agreement. The plan was undermined when the company's
| general counsel forwarded his own unique version of the e-mail
| with the attached agreement. As a result, Musk's scheme was
| realized by employees who now had a safe copy to leak.[4
| dekhn wrote:
| "Curses! Foiled again by my own insubordinates"
| williamsmj wrote:
| Yep. The story as Musk tells it, and as goes viral every couple
| of months, is a lie.
| tb0ne wrote:
| Where has Musk told the story?
| williamsmj wrote:
| https://twitter.com/pnikosis/status/1592823543498436611.
| Apparently that quote is from a (now deleted) tweet of his
| per https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international
| /worl....
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| People will just collude by diff-ing the delivered material going
| forward
| dogman144 wrote:
| If you're at a company that's incentivized to do insider threat
| programs - big tech, finance, govt tech, any sort of serious
| funding - these tactics are commonplace. If watermarked emails
| seems over the top, there are almost certainly IT security tools
| with extensive access running as a process on your machine for
| this use case too.
| dogman144 wrote:
| To be more clear - if you're doing anything other than work
| stuff on your work computer, bad call. It's almost certainly
| logged somehow/somewhere in the company, and just depends on if
| the company has the staffing to check.
|
| With ithreat, there is someone checking who doesn't care about
| your reddit use.
|
| But, The 1-2 blend of insider threat programs having the access
| and wfh productivity suspicions increasing makes me think mgmt
| will poke under the hood in these logs beyond I-threat concerns
| at some point soon.
| yumraj wrote:
| Is there a mass email software that supports this? I haven't seen
| it.
|
| On a separate note, I'm sure that by now he's pretty much
| destroyed the entire culture there. So, while many folks will
| hang around for now, since economy, but most are possibly
| thinking of leaving. In the end only the most desperate will be
| left there, so yeah, pretty _hardcore_.
| bparsons wrote:
| Distributing unique, but similar documents is a pretty standard
| method of document control/leak detection. It was certainly not
| invented by Musk or anyone at Tesla.
| defterGoose wrote:
| Kinda surprised Elon didn't just do around spraying everyone with
| soapy water. Easier to implement and more sadistic.
| colesantiago wrote:
| just take a screenshot with a camera on the content [0], duh.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
| silversmith wrote:
| It warms my heart that practices we used to use in EvE Online
| forums to identify internet spaceship strategy leakers are now
| being applied more widely :)
| otikik wrote:
| Thisiswhyineverusespaces.Problemsolved.
| jwozn wrote:
| ^ Surprisingly easy to read... Youmightbeontosomething
| prox wrote:
| But since you are the only one doing this...
| LanceH wrote:
| If he just pulls out the verb and puts it on the end, he can
| mingle with the Germans.
| not1ofU wrote:
| Not sure I beleive this, I think this is parallel construction.
| Because why would they give away the method they used?
| nzach wrote:
| Microsoft used the same idea to caught leakers working with the
| new dashboard for the xbox360:
| https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/469221-how-microsoft-cau...
|
| The difference is that in the 360 dashboard they used
| "decorative" rings to encode the information.
| arantius wrote:
| This sounds interesting. Sadly the link (to the tweet) in that
| article is broken. This appears to be a screenshot of the tweet
| in question: https://old.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/a4y3n8
| josefresco wrote:
| What's the best process to strip these hidden characters? Is the
| an app, or web service that will "clean" the copy?
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Copy paste the text into and console text editor. Should easily
| see the "hidden" characters, then.
| vntok wrote:
| It could be only hidden characters, but it could also be (and
| it most likely actually is also) a few commas instead of full
| stops, words like "many" replaced by "a lot of" or any other
| kind of substitution really.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Translate it back & forth. It'll as a bonus also clear out any
| specific words used to trap you.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Retyping it by hand is far safer.
| glonq wrote:
| Do a search-and-replace to change all double spaces to single.
| Asdrubalini wrote:
| Just use a for loop in Python over all characters and ignore
| each char that is not in the ASCII range of letters, numbers
| and punctuation. Or retype by hand if you don't know Python.
| Symbiote wrote:
| cat document | tr -dc '[A-Za-z0-9.,!@$%*()/?" -]'
| bloak wrote:
| It's often a good idea to check for weird characters in a text
| file. Something like this:
|
| cat file.txt | perl -C63 -pe '$_ = join("\n", split(//, $_));'
| | sort | uniq -c
|
| I've found lots of errors that way: BOMs in the middle of a
| file, different kinds of dash, quotation marks or brackets that
| don't match, ...
| berkes wrote:
| There's a rather old service to clean such copy. It's a called
| a printer and while it will remove spacing and other invisible
| characters, the process of printing onto paper hardly ever
| works. Despite hardware for doing so have been on market for
| decades.
| vntok wrote:
| The printer will not remove any spacing, and it will not fix
| word substitutions.
|
| However it will add almost invisible markings onto the paper
| itself, such that the page can be linked to the actual
| printer, exact timestamp and username of the person who
| printed.
| pwg wrote:
| > However it will add almost invisible markings onto the
| paper itself
|
| That only happens on color printers. It is called Machine
| Identification Code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_
| Identification_Code).
|
| Supposedly the reason is to trap currency counterfeiters.
|
| Black and white printers do not add such dots.
| bricss wrote:
| RegExp
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Paraphrasing would help identifying person by writing style,
| IIRC by leaking specialist. It could also erase hidden signals
| in the message.
| chii wrote:
| if the steganography signature is unique to the user receiving
| the content, then you might have to diff it with someone else's
| to see it (otherwise, you cannot really guess where the changes
| are which steganographically stores your identity).
|
| If it is the same content for all users receiving the text,
| then you can just retype the text (not copy/paste) into a
| different file. Of course, authenticity comes to question if
| you whistleblow by doing this.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The only really foolproof way is to convert the text to a
| bitmap and then OCR it, to ensure you aren't trapped by
| lookalike glpyhs or varying spaces. (OCR will generally make
| all spaces single, since spacing varies so widely in practice
| due to things like justification. It also usually makes all
| quotes straight since the per-font variation makes it too hard
| to distinguish open/close quotes.)
|
| You can do this easily enough on MacOS simply by taking a
| screenshot, pasting it into Preview, selecting the text with
| its automatic OCR, and copying.
|
| Of course you still need to worry about whether line lengths
| are varied per-recipient, or even the wording of the e-mail
| itself. But the above will at least take care of glyphs.
| djohnston wrote:
| I was thinking about this recently, couldn't you alter one word
| in message to create two copies, and then basically perform
| binary search until you find the person?
| _wolfie_ wrote:
| Yep. It was used in EVE: Online multiple times :)
| mirages wrote:
| Or hiding user ID in either the background of the forum
| playing on the alpha channel or using a special formula to
| hide the ID inside displayed users scores to identify who is
| leaking forum's info to other alliances.
|
| (back when forums were still a thing)
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Yes
| eesmith wrote:
| Tom Clancy in the book "Patriot games" (1987), p86 at
| https://archive.org/details/patriotgamesclan00clan/page/86/m...
| :
|
| > ... first draft of the report, I came up with an idea to make
| each one unique."
|
| > "They've been doing that for years," Holmes noted. "All one
| must do is misplace a comma here and there. Easiest thing in
| the world. If the newspeople are foolish enough to print a
| photograph of the document, we can identify the leak."
|
| > "Yes, sir, and the reporters who publish the leaks know that,
| too. They've learned not to show photographs of the documents
| they get from their sources, haven't they?" Ryan answered.
| "What I came up with was a new twist on that. _Agents and
| Agencies_ has four sections. Each section has a summary
| paragraph. Each of those is written in a fairly dramatic
| fashion. "
|
| > "Yes, I noticed that," Charleston said. "Didn't read like a
| CIA document at all. More like one of ours. We use people to
| write our reports, you see, not computers. Do go on."
|
| > "Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the
| mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of
| the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but
| only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The
| reason the summary paragraphs are so -- well, lurid, I guess --
| is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public
| media. If he quotes something from two or three of those
| paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who
| leaked it. They've got an even more refined version of the trap
| working now. You can do it by computer. You use a thesaurus
| program to shuffle through synonyms, and you can make every
| copy of the document totally unique."
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| I believe the novel "The Word" by Irving Wallace (1972)
| features something similar, if I remember correctly.
| eesmith wrote:
| Found it!
| https://archive.org/details/word0000wall/page/336/mode/2up
|
| > "... Say we send this memo to the same people who
| received the other memo -- well, we don't have to include
| anyone in this room -- you're in on it -- but we'll send
| copies to every one of the others. Each copy of the new
| memo would be exactly the same, except for one word. In
| each memo there would be one word not in the others. We
| would keep a record of the person to whom we sent the memo
| -- and beside his name we would jot the unique word that
| was in his memo. Do you see what I'm driving at? When the
| memo goes out, the person here who is betraying us will
| pass it on word for word to de Vroome, isn't that so? Your
| informer in de Vroome's headquarters would learn of it and
| report back to you. Since no memorandum would be precisely
| the same as the others, because of the single word change,
| you'd look for the different word in the memo de Vroome
| received and be able to find out the person who had passed
| on his copy of the memo. You'd know your traitor."
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Nice, thank you! I tried to CTRL-F it myself there and
| hadn't managed.
| willis936 wrote:
| I believe Tyrion did this trick to find out who he could trust
| while he was serving as Hand of the King.
| m2fkxy wrote:
| It's called a barium meal test, or canary trap.
| hash872 wrote:
| Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk (from a few years ago) had a fun
| similar story. Someone inside Tesla wrote a letter, I believe
| complaining about product defects, which was printed by a media
| outlet. Figuring that the leaker printed the letter at Tesla
| offices (i.e. likely didn't have a printer at home), Musk re-
| typed the letter in Word, found out exactly how many kilobytes a
| Word file with that exact text would be, then searched the
| printer logs for who printed a file with precisely that many KBs
| recently. Doing this, he found the leaker. (It's been a few years
| since I read the book so a couple of the details may be off, but
| that was the gist of the story)
| bee_rider wrote:
| Err, did he find the leaker or just anybody who'd printed that
| file? Hypothetically one person could have printed it at work
| while the leaker printed it at home, right?
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| Perhaps Musk's shoddy logic is what's currently pushing
| Twitter to the brink!
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm sure the belief that one can find a technological
| solution to any problem, including social and
| organizational ones, wouldn't help.
| dekhn wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, e.g.
| snark, putdowns, and swipes? You've been doing it
| repeatedly and we've asked you not to, repeatedly.
|
| No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better but you
| owe this community better if you're participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dekhn wrote:
| You haven't asked me repeatedly to stop doing this. It's
| the first time. I see far worse crap from other users all
| the time. It kind of looks like you're protecting paulg
| and elon from criticism.
|
| You did shut my account down previously but it was
| determined you were mistaken.
| dang wrote:
| There were at least these occasions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30249117 (Feb 2022)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29895865 (Jan 2022)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346858 (Nov 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17682627 (Aug 2018)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668442 (April 2014)
|
| Since you replied to most of those, I assume you saw
| them.
|
| > You did shut my account down previously but it was
| determined you were mistaken.
|
| We weren't mistaken. We rate limited your account
| correctly because you were breaking the site guidelines.
| I removed the rate limit because you emailed and asked
| us, and because at that point I looked at your recent
| history and it seemed your comments had been fine for a
| while.
|
| When we take a rate limit off, and then an account
| reverts to its old guidelines-breaking habits, we put the
| rate limit back on. Please fix this so we don't have to.
| It's nothing personal--we're just trying to protect the
| forum from poisoning itself.
|
| This has zero to do with protecting any famous individual
| from criticism--if you or anyone else doubts this, just
| do some comment searches using HN Search (there's a
| search box at bottom of each page here) and you'll soon
| disabuse yourself of that illusion.
| bArray wrote:
| To be really secure when leaking typed documents, I get 5
| colleagues together and we whisper the leak along the line, so
| that many of the words are changed by the end. For each word we
| are randomly spaced to defeat Musk's space-based detection.
|
| We then take the output of this and transcribe it over an old
| HAM radio to a friend in China. He lives on a farm, so he then
| dictates it to a chicken who writes it in the sand. He quickly
| takes a picture before the wind erases it.
|
| He then contacts a US media publisher under the name 'Whu Lee
| K', and they print it as is! What a wonderful time to be alive.
| blowski wrote:
| Are you not worried the chicken is a Musk informant?
| Shouldn't you be using a range of animals who each only have
| access to part of the message?
| rideontime wrote:
| Absolutely fake. The tell is that Musk himself did all the
| sleuthing.
| tsss wrote:
| There's no way someone as stupid as him thought of that.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Printing out whistleblower letters using work hardware is not a
| smart idea...
| chasd00 wrote:
| yeah i always thought the SOP was to take a picture of your
| screen with a camera. Print that out at home, manually
| mark/cut out the parts you don't want to leak, take another
| picture, print, and leak that copy.
| thih9 wrote:
| Moral of the story, if you're about to leak data, don't use a
| company printer. Or, for that matter, anything that would log
| that leak and could be traced to you.
|
| Like other commenters, I find it hard to believe that this
| actually happened.
| orangepurple wrote:
| This is called parallel construction. The story as told didn't
| actually happen IMO.
| xeromal wrote:
| I don't know the truth of this specific story, but I will
| note that the Ashley Vance book wasn't an autobiography. I
| believe musk asked him not to write the book.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Yet another reason to lock your screen when you stand up. The
| guy could have printed it from someone else's computer.
|
| It seems incredibly naive to print out a leak letter from work.
| boringg wrote:
| I was always curious if you could search printer logs for
| details of who printed what at a company but never really spent
| much thought process on it. Clearly you can.
| salmaanp wrote:
| if they were using mac, better way would just be to check
| /var/spool/cups and see if the file is present.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Figuring that the leaker printed the letter at Tesla offices
| (i.e. likely didn't have a printer at home)
|
| sounds like this was likely an internal report (which would
| have been printed at the office as part of one's work), which
| later made its way to the media, rather than some letter
| stealthily written and sent to the media (which would have been
| unlikely to be printed at the office)
| yborg wrote:
| Don't most large office printers watermark all pages anyway?
| Our Ricoh did.
| dagmx wrote:
| Not to be a party pooper , but afaik this story didn't happen
| and has actually been told for years attributed to various
| different people and agencies.
| maigret wrote:
| That's how legends get built.
| njovin wrote:
| The most impressive/unbelievable part of this story is that 2
| Word files, created separately, ended up with the same exact
| file size. I'd assume with all of the Metadata they cram in
| that this would be unlikely.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I can imagine that a company actually saves everything being
| printed for security / auditing reasons, along with who
| issued the print request, etc.
| datadata wrote:
| I think such a company would equally want to not retain
| such records (at least not indefinitely), for fear of
| discovery in legal processes, etc.
| dmix wrote:
| Or most likely laziness.
| mpweiher wrote:
| Or a fortuitous combination of the two...
| mattkrause wrote:
| Doing that suggests they think that the threat from
| insiders >>> outsiders.
| voakbasda wrote:
| It always is. Insiders have more access. They are
| trusted. That makes them a much greater threat if they
| decide to do harm.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think that ... _certain nations_ ... are quite good at
| playing "the long game," and often have their plants
| hired by companies; sometimes at fairly senior/sensitive
| levels. They may not even start phoning home, until they
| have had a few promotions.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Well when the concern is leaked internal memos, that is a
| very reasonable assumption.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| OP says he compared them in terms of KBs, if this is taken
| literally then he didn't check to see if they were exactly
| the same length. Assuming that the two word documents are
| actually identical except for metadata, I wouldn't expect the
| size discrepancy to be on the order of kilobytes.
|
| Still a reckless way to identify the leaker, there's plenty
| of reasonable doubt if all they have to go on is the size of
| the document that was printed.
| schemescape wrote:
| The simplest answer is that this didn't happen and it's just
| a myth.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Honestly speaking, the story sounds somewhat believable to
| me.
|
| They likely misidentified the leaker with that silly
| analysis and fired them on the spot, would be just the
| usual modus operandi of musk.
| chasd00 wrote:
| they probably narrowed it down to one person and
| approached them with the logs and "admit and be fired or
| don't admit and legal (and all the bad/expensive stuff
| that comes with that) will be engaged to get to the
| bottom of it starting with you".
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| You can also easily narrow it down to a time period. Find
| out when leak occurred and then look at prints shortly
| before that.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| FredPret wrote:
| Two different leaks. One was a printed word file. One was
| a double-space-encoded email.
| leereeves wrote:
| How likely is it that there would just happen to be a
| file with exactly the same _wrong_ size in the printer
| logs?
| whatwherewhy wrote:
| Maybe there was few % error but no other candidate.
| brodo wrote:
| I'd say if the letter was short it's pretty likely.
| cma wrote:
| Which printers in that timeframe ever directly printed
| word files?
| simondotau wrote:
| It would be the resulting spool file that gets measured,
| not the source Doc file.
| bombastry wrote:
| I agree; this story is apocryphal. I was annoyed enough
| that I did some research into the story. Via this Atlantic
| article[1], I found the original Valleywag post[2]
| containing the letter from the employee. It's worth noting
| that the letter from the employee is pure text (i.e. not a
| scan of a letter), is only 170 words long, and has a couple
| of misspellings. The Valleywag post provides a paraphrasing
| of what the employee told them, followed by what seems to
| be the entire body of the email that they received.
|
| The Musk detective work is described by Vance in a
| footnote:
|
| "Musk would later discover the identity of this employee in
| an ingenious way. He copied the text of the letter into a
| Word document, checked the size of the file, sent it to a
| printer, and looked over the logs of printer activity to
| find one of the same size. He could then trace that back to
| the person who had printed the original file. The employee
| wrote a letter of apology and resigned."
|
| This leaves me a with more than a few questions:
|
| 1. Why would this email/letter have been printed out? It's
| short, informal, and did not seem to contain any corporate
| materials that would require access from a work computer.
| Surely, this would be better sent as an email from a
| personal computer? All I can think of is that the employee
| did print some kind of private company information (perhaps
| as proof?) to send to Valleywag. But wouldn't this mean
| that the print-job sizes wouldn't match since there would
| be printed materials not made public? It seems beyond
| insane to physically mail a tip to a gossip site that was
| built around emailed tips.
|
| 2. If this was sent as a physical letter, why would the
| quote in the article contain the typos? Why would they even
| take the time to type up the entire letter when the article
| summarizes every single point that the Tesla employee
| mentioned? Shouldn't they have taken some care to not
| verbatim reproduce text that could have gotten their source
| into trouble? I will say that the minimal journalistic
| standards employed by former Gawker-network sites provide
| convenient explanations to these questions, so these aren't
| particularly damning.
|
| 3. Is this really all the text that was sent to Valleywag?
| The quoted part of the letter provides no salutation or
| signature. Sending this text exactly as quoted as a
| physical letter seems bizarre, even for an anonymous tip.
|
| 4. Would the sizes of the files sent to the printer even
| match up considering the document metadata? This actually
| seems somewhat plausible.
|
| 5. Would the print-job really be the best way to figure out
| who the leaker was? In October 2008, before the letter was
| written, Tesla only had 363 employees[3] and may have laid
| off a few dozen of them before this letter was written.
| This employee claims to have joined in 2004. A Wired
| article from 2006[4] mentions a meeting of 30 Tesla
| employees and board members in December 2004. It seems like
| there are a very small number of people who could have been
| the potentially leaker. How many of those people were using
| the corporate printers the day after the mentioned all-
| hands meeting to print a single page document?
|
| --------
|
| I imagine that this story was told to present Musk as
| smarter than everyone else while also threatening
| disloyalty, which seems to be a frequent Musk bugbear. The
| bit about the caught employee writing a letter of apology
| and then resigning (amidst large-scale layoffs at Tesla in
| 2008!) also seems a little too cute, in a chain-email-
| atheist-professor-humiliated-by-freshman-Albert-Einstein
| kind of way.
|
| --------
|
| [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/
| elon-...
|
| [2] https://www.gawker.com/5071621/tesla-motors-
| has-9-million-in...
|
| [3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-oct-25-fi-
| tesla...
|
| [4] https://www.wired.com/2006/08/tesla-3/
| jwilk wrote:
| The wired.com link doesn't work me ("Sorry, something has
| gone wrong"). Archived copy:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221116003941/https://www.wi
| red...
| germandiago wrote:
| You could use bounds from x KB to y KB if you know the
| version of Word used and try to approach.
|
| It is a difficult task, anyways.
| eschneider wrote:
| The size of the saved word file (depending on exactly how
| it was saved and what version) will vary depending on how
| it was edited, and yeah, what metadata is there, so this
| seems...wrong.
| Someone wrote:
| The OP talks about the size in kilobytes, not bytes. That
| will almost certainly give false positives, but if you limit
| the time range, it may not be that bad.
|
| Not a bad idea for initial filtering, I think, but I doubt it
| would hold up in court on itself.
| tomhallett wrote:
| Agreed - the goal isn't "the KB's prove you are guilty".
| It's metadata which serves as a means to reduce the number
| of computers you need to examine with a more complex/manual
| search (deleted files, temporary/corrupted files, word
| document history, interviewing the employee, comparing the
| material in the document with the role/responsibilities of
| the employee, etc).
| throwntoday wrote:
| I think you're forgetting that he could just re-print the
| file once he had located which printer it was on to verify.
| Once verified it's the file in question, you could easily
| check which device sent it to the printer.
| [deleted]
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Parallel construction.
| rurp wrote:
| This was my first thought as well. Is the file size really
| that precisely deterministic from a mammoth program like Word
| given different dates, machines, versions, etc?
|
| Given that Musk is not the most reliable narrator, to say the
| least, I'm skeptical of this story. I'm sure he sees plenty
| of utility in appearing omniscient to frighten potential
| leakers.
| courgette wrote:
| Same here, maybe Tesla as a homogeneous word deployment?
|
| I'm sure between various version there is difference in what
| is produced.
|
| Unless you can ask word for the equivalent of a postscript ?
| some_random wrote:
| From what I've heard of their engineering practices, it
| would be shocking if any deployment they have is
| homogeneous
| thegeomaster wrote:
| I believe the printer logs would contain the size of a
| Postscript-like equivalent, not the docx itself. I wonder
| if the story is missing the detail of submitting the new
| Word file to a printer and checking the size. Or he fired
| someone random where Word doc size == printer input size.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jnsie wrote:
| had the exact same thought. if anyone works in-office and has
| the time/capacity (don't get fired) to do this with some
| colleagues, it'd be a fun and interesting experiment!
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| He searched the _printer logs_. Presumably when Word sends
| stuff to the printer, it doesn 't bother with all the
| extraneous garbage it puts in files. Printer communication
| hasn't changed much in decades.
| smt88 wrote:
| If he had access to printer logs, he would know exactly
| what everyone printed and when they did it.
|
| Networked printers store a lot of information about what is
| being printed.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In general a lot of metadata is kept, but very rarely is
| the full print content kept (though in some organizations
| it may be for security review). The difficulty here is
| figuring what metadata is relevant, in this case size was
| the most important.
| brookst wrote:
| Still. He'd have to have the same normal.dot, make the same
| space/tab choices, same fonts, etc.
|
| And in a large company, how many ~1 page letters get
| printed? What are the odds that there is only a single
| match in the entire company?
|
| I take this story similar to the binary coded space story:
| more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter future
| leakers than true stories about catching them in the past.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Perhaps it wasn't an exact byte match, but close enough
| to only 1 print job size within a reasonable time frame.
| barelysapient wrote:
| Exactly this. If you know that its around 36kb, and had
| to be printed between two dates, the list narrows
| substantially. And more than likely, the printer queue or
| corporate compliance tools had additional functionality
| that made such a search trivial.
|
| I have my own story about this: In the early 2010's I had
| a boss that loved to call us and check in every day. We
| were a remote team and he had anxiety that we were all
| larking off. I later learned his technique was to open
| the dropbox admin tools to see the location of someone
| before calling them. "So, BarelySapient, where are you
| working at today?", he'd ask in a cheerful tone. But in
| reality, he was testing employee truthfulness. Every
| call. He later fired one of my co-workers when they
| reported to be working from home, but dropbox reported
| them somewhere in the Florida keys....
| mschuster91 wrote:
| ... and here I'm just happy about German employee and EU
| data protection laws. This kind of abuse would be plainly
| illegal here and entitle the employee to significant
| compensation.
| simondotau wrote:
| What part would be illegal?
| rurp wrote:
| Certainly possible, but also relies on the assumption
| that this was done on company equipment. When leaking
| info under a vindictive boss I would think opsec rule #1
| is avoid company equipment as much as possible. Even
| without a printer at home, it's quite easy to send a
| print job to a local office or shipping store.
| zakki wrote:
| Or take A picture of the letter Or retype the letter
| using leaker's own smartphone.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Ironically, we had an employee appear to exfiltrate data
| through a print shop. They almost got away with it
| unnoticed.
|
| The USB stick they used to make the transfer contracted
| ransomware from the public terminal, which put everyone
| on high alert when it was next introduced into the
| corporate network.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Data exfiltration is an extremely dangerous risk in the
| world of corporate espionage, especially for a company
| like Tesla that is trying to be first to market with
| something as massive as FSD.
|
| There is no way I would send anything to an external
| print shop from company equipment; they are almost
| certainly on top of that as well.
| rurp wrote:
| This has gotten me genuinely curious, I wonder what the
| safest way to get a document like that onto your own
| device is. Printing it on a work printer doesn't seem
| ideal, but I don't really know what the best approach is.
| Maybe emailing it to an outside address or sharing it as
| a document via Dropbox or similar? Copying to physical
| storage? All of those seem fairly easy to monitor as well
| though.
|
| If any infosec experts feel like chiming in I'd love to
| learn more.
| brookst wrote:
| Take photo of screen with phone camera, carry it home,
| OCR. If you're really paranoid you don't want to send the
| document's bytes off your system or use any unusual
| program (e.g. steganography) to edit them.
| zdragnar wrote:
| It will always be a game of cat and mouse. Your
| protections for leaking are limited to legal
| whistleblower protections against retaliation, so odds
| are anything suggested here will potentially be traceable
| or suspicious, which may invite further scrutiny.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Anything done on a corporate machine needs to be assumed
| monitored. The paranoid approach would be to fully power
| off the machine, take the hard drive out, then use an
| independent machine to mount and read the data off that.
| Now, if they suspect that approach, or they suspect you
| personally, there will likely be evidence of your
| hardware tampering. But it would thwart automated mass-
| surveillance solutions.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Sheesh, Tesla FSD would be even worse than the "secret
| Coca-Cola formula", no one would even want to be in the
| same computer with it.
|
| Now, production cost figures and schedules ...
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| > I take this story similar to the binary coded space
| story: more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter
| future leakers than true stories about catching them in
| the past.
|
| Or have a printer at home on stand-by for your leak press
| releases. If I were Musk, I would have fired him/her not
| for being a snitch, but for his/her sloppiness and
| overall carelessness and lack of discipline.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| It's probably not the only bit of evidence. "Hmm, it's
| about the same size, it was printed at about the right
| time and... yeah it sounds like *that* guy, let's see
| what else he printed - oh, nothing? Cool."
| HPsquared wrote:
| Is that so unlikely? They would be on the same network,
| same configuration.
| boringg wrote:
| You could filter on time and size and then get a subset
| of likely candidates and whittle it down to the expected
| people.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Could be the case that there were only a handful of
| things printed at the whole company in a week,
| considering how obsolete paper has been getting
| jjk166 wrote:
| I would imagine any two computers at Tesla have a very
| good chance of having identical normal.dot, and font can
| be determined by looking at the letter. For a letter, who
| is using tabs for anything but the start of paragraphs?
| Even if it's not perfect, it's unlikely to change the
| size of a word document (which is likely <25 kB to begin
| with) by a full kilobyte.
|
| Basically all it would tell you is the number of word
| documents with approximately the same amount of text were
| printed, plus or minus about a paragraph. Letters aren't
| frequently printed and the contents of the leak would
| almost certainly limit the number of suspects to a small
| handful of people. It's not hard at all to believe that
| in a group of ~50 people and a time window of ~1 week you
| might only have one even close match.
| moron4hire wrote:
| It is also possible he's just a lunatic who fired an
| innocent person.
| aaron695 wrote:
| savanaly wrote:
| What are the odds that he calculated a certain number of
| bytes, and exactly one other employee had sent a file to
| the printer that contained that number, but it was just a
| coincidence? If the method indeed doesn't work (as you
| suggest "is possible") it's impossible it would turn up a
| false positive, only a false negative.
| capitol_ wrote:
| It's also possible that he calculated the number of
| bytes, searched the logs, didn't find anything and then
| tweaked his numbers until something matched. And then
| fired that random person to make a statement and lied
| about how he found out who to fire.
| politician wrote:
| This approach would work in isolation, but by failing to
| find the true leaker would result in them being empowered
| to leak more over time. Is there evidence that Tesla has
| a lot of regular leaks?
| savanaly wrote:
| I didn't mean to claim other than that anything is
| _possible_. I was just saying the original theory put
| forward wasn 't internally logical.
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| almost as good as the odds that he got something pretty
| close, then changed the details a bit to fit the
| narrative.
|
| or, he stayed up for two days until he got it exactly to
| match by tweaking his approach a little at a time, and
| actually matched it to the right person. Honestly, he
| seems like he'd do this.
| dmix wrote:
| Sounds like a fun project any hacker would get distracted
| by.
| stavros wrote:
| You wouldn't do that though, would you? You'd type the
| thing up, print it, see that the printer received a 4.7
| KB (or whatever) doc and look for a 4-6 KB doc the week
| of the leak, and then you have 100 documents to go
| through, rather than 100000.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Or lying. When you are rich or famous people or in vogue
| socially let you get away with these stories e.g.
| Consider feynmans "I'm modest but look at my genius"-isms
| tsol wrote:
| Yeah exactly. My thought was he probably found the leaker
| in a much more mundane way, but being undeniably great at
| PR he decided to spice up the story with this little bit
| of detective work. It sounds so clever you want to
| believe it, even if it's pretty impractical(not
| impossible though!). You know what they say, don't let
| the truth get in the way of a good story.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I would assume there was also at least a minor degree of
| due diligence, such as "Would this person actually have
| had the knowledge to write letter".
| marcusverus wrote:
| It'd be even easier than that. Walk to the person's desk
| and ask them to bring up the document that they printed
| on ${printer} at ${time}. If he can't produce a document
| of the correct size, he's your guy.
| elliekelly wrote:
| This is a good way to fire innocent employees who had the
| audacity to edit a document after they've printed it.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Looking at twitter these days I sure have a feeling this
| is not super unlikely.
| VectorLock wrote:
| More important is spreading the perception he was able to
| sleuth down who the leaker was, to deter future leakers.
| nimbius wrote:
| id assume a billionaire heir to a diamond mine with an econ
| BA parsing various different models of printer logs for
| fifteen offices late into the evening would have discredited
| the quote entirely, But the cult of personality implores me
| to insist even Stalin himself did something similar in both
| Haskell and emacs.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I thought printers had a unique fingerprint that's embedded in
| every document they print?
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Laser printers do yes.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
| greesil wrote:
| Who still uses a printer at work?
| brk wrote:
| Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would generally assume that
| everybody has at least 1 printer at home. I'm also not aware of
| many printers that keep logs for long durations, but perhaps
| their shared network printers were logging to some kind of
| system log.
| prepend wrote:
| It's higher than I expected at 70% of Americans having home
| printers. [0]
|
| I expected it to be super old but there must be old people
| with printers.
|
| I get annoyed when companies expect me to print stuff at
| home. I prefer companies to assume that no one has a home
| printer and plan for it by including return labels and
| whatnot.
|
| [0] https://metafacts.com/home-printer-trends-in-the-us-
| tupdate/
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| My wife wanted a photo printer. At first I told her it was
| a ridiculously primitive and pointless idea, but I went
| along with it since I had a bonus burning a hole in my
| pocket
|
| I have to admit, it turned out to be pretty cool. I hadn't
| used a printer in years for anything personal, and it turns
| out you can print professional-looking glossy photos for
| like 15 cents each between ink and glossy photo paper. Now
| we have a ton of nice family photos all over the walls, and
| I printed out a selfie from my WoW character when our guild
| killed some raid boss together and mixed it in with the
| other pics
| bojan wrote:
| I wonder how many of those printers are actually still
| functioning. There was a time once where you actually had
| to print stuff (anyone remembers MapQuest maps?), so I'm
| guessing there are still a lot of printers from that era
| collecting dust at people's homes.
| jwozn wrote:
| I had an old HP printer from 2009 that I finally got rid
| of this year. The case was broken, the tray was falling
| off, and it spent years collecting dust. It still worked!
| Only the ink dried out. I'm curious about the reliability
| of printers, and how often people have to replace them.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Yea i have a printer; a decent one (laser iirc) for my
| wifes college papers. We've not hooked it up in years
| though, and offhand i'm not even sure how to use it..
| that's how long it's been lol. Hell, i'm not even exactly
| sure _where_ it is ..
| rtkwe wrote:
| I swapped over to a laser printer for that exact reason.
| There's still a few things a year I need to print and the
| laser printer stays working through the lulls where I
| always had issues with inkjets clogging up.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Yes, I love my laser printer. It's somewhere around 10
| years old, and has printed a grand total of 99 pages. But
| it's still happily using the same toner it came with,
| while an inkjet's ink would have dried out and needed
| replacing countless times.
| distances wrote:
| And I walk to a nearby copy shop for my printing needs.
| At maybe twice a year it's a rare enough occasion that I
| refuse to keep a printer myself.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I do shooting sports so I print a lot of targets for that
| too.
| olyjohn wrote:
| That's what I do for photo printing. I use my laser for
| things like maps, tickets, instructions and forms. Love
| using it to print out instructions for use in the shop,
| where I can get my greasy fingers all over the paper, and
| not on my nice clean instruction manual.... When I need
| some color photos printed, I head to the print shop.
| iceburgcrm wrote:
| My c64 has a great working dotmatrix printer. A home
| computer without a printer is a modern invention. I would
| expect if the employee had a computer they would have a
| printer.
| kube-system wrote:
| I would expect the employee to have a modern computer.
| kace91 wrote:
| >Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would generally assume that
| everybody has at least 1 printer at home.
|
| I haven't seen a home printer since I moved out. In all these
| years I've only needed to use a printer once (sheet music
| when I was learning piano).
|
| It's just not that common to use paper anymore, aside from
| school projects.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| School projects and super-handy things like being able to
| print coloring pages on-demand for most any topic one can
| think up, are probably a big part of why they're still so
| common. It is _so_ damn nice to have a printer if you have
| kids of most any age.
|
| I've also yet to find a superior UI to printed pages for
| running RPGs. Books are great, iPads are great, laptops can
| be OK, but for the _core_ material you need for a given
| session, there 's nothing in the world I know of that beats
| ~20-30 pages of printed notes and excerpted bits of PDF
| books & some randomly-generated junk from the Web for each
| session, so you have _only_ expected-to-be-relevant info in
| it. Nothing better when you 're actually at the table. I
| mean, you could do the same thing writing it by hand if you
| have very neat handwriting, but being able to mix together
| your own notes and e.g. NPC template-blocks, custom maps,
| _and_ commercial material pulled from books, is awesome and
| saves tons of time when prepping. You can achieve something
| similar with just an iPad, but it 's still slower and more
| awkward to actually use--though I do have other things I
| use tablets for at the table, that they excel at.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > everybody has at least 1 printer at home
|
| why would anyone have _more_ than one at home?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| A photo printer and some fast laser printer for example.
| weberer wrote:
| I haven't needed to print anything at home in over a decade.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Corporate networks tend to keep printer logs for extremely
| long durations.
|
| Also, printers at home are incredibly useful. I'm surprised
| more people don't have them. Especially now that online
| shopping (and therefore online returns) are so much more
| common and require printing return labels.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Amazon returns no longer require printing out labels, so
| someone who does most/all their online ordering via Amazon
| wouldn't need a printer.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I need to print return stickers for Amazon in EU.
| flo123456 wrote:
| Interesting. I'm germany we love paper but amazon returns
| work without the need to print a label at home.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| In Austria you do need to print the label. How dos
| returning without a label work? I mean how does the post
| know where to ship the package?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| At least in the US, Amazon has arrangements with major
| shipping companies like UPS and FedEx. So if you want to
| return something, Amazon says "Bring the item to your
| local UPS store and have them scan this QR code." The QR
| code gives UPS the shipping information it needs.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I just did a similar return for an Ebay package, but with
| USPS. At least in that case there's definitely a label,
| it's just a matter of who prints it. You could print it
| yourself from an attachment on the email, or show a QR
| code at the post office and they'd print it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Only for things bought and sold through amazon. If you
| get something sent directly from a seller returns have
| you print out a label.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I have occasion to actually need to print something about
| twice a year. I don't know how it is that we live such
| drastically different lifestyles that you find them so
| incredibly useful.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| I typically also only print 2-3 times a year as well. But
| those times are sensitive-ish documents (one being hard
| copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet,
| even though it's submitted electronically) and I don't
| want them printed on a printer I don't own (paranoia).
| (And my printer is not connected to the network, I
| connect via USB).
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my
| filing cabinet
|
| ...what year is this? Like, I have some questions:
|
| 1) Why keep hard copies of documents created
| electronically when there are _so many_ more redundant,
| more secure, and more convenient ways keep the electronic
| versions themselves?
|
| 2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms
| that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms
| that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?
|
| Well, it includes social-security numbers for starters,
| and may also include bank account routing information
| (where to send the refund check, or withdraw in case of
| extra payment needed).
| pixl97 wrote:
| 1) It's been more than once that we've seen hackers
| completely wipe people's digital lives? I mean, how
| problematic will logging in to many of these services be
| if Google decides to lock your account?
|
| 2) As an American example, ask Trump, he really doesn't
| want to release that information for one reason or
| another. Simply put trying to figure out other peoples
| security and sensitivity sensibilities is not something
| you have all the details on and are making vast
| assumptions.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > It's been more than once that we've seen hackers
| completely wipe people's digital lives? I mean, how
| problematic will logging in to many of these services be
| if Google decides to lock your account?
|
| There are still much more convenient and technically
| superior methods than using physical paper copies if that
| is your concern.
|
| > ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that
| information for one reason or another.
|
| Using "unscrupulous, if not criminal, activity" as an
| example in this instance doesn't seem like the best
| argument.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Technically superior is a very biased argument... A safe
| with a key is a very well established security mechanism
| with a pretty easily traceable chain of custody. Someone
| has to physically be at the location of the files to get
| the files.
|
| Any digital record has a huge number of failure modes.
| For security you'll want to encrypt, when encrypted
| you'll now have another piece of data you need to secure
| and backup. You have to ensure the backup services are
| secure. If any of these become insecure how do you trace
| the insecure accesses? If it was accessed from overseas
| what do you do about it?
|
| Criminal activity is common, but lets go with something
| that would be criminal in one country and not in
| another... This gets very messy with cloud services where
| some other government can request the information. With a
| safe you have to get the local government to sign off on
| a warrant.
| cossatot wrote:
| I print once or twice a month--return labels, random home
| admin (taxes or city stuff), and I prefer paper boarding
| passes (w/ backup on my phone) because they're less fussy
| for a number of reasons than the phone. I also print
| documents that I need to carefully read or edit, because
| I am easily distracted when reading/editing boring stuff
| on a computer and can waste too much time writing about
| using printers on HN.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Honestly, printers have gotten so cheap that the pain in
| the ass they can save when needed would make them useful
| to have for even that low of a volume. Printing a return
| label means I don't have to drive to a shipper. Your
| cheapest printers nowadays can scan and sometimes fax,
| which is useful for when legal or other requirements
| force you to submit a signed document. I'm not a fan of
| digital tickets for travel and events due to the apps
| being garbage and the severe consequences in case of
| technical problems, so these are easily printed as well.
|
| As crappy as modern printers are, they provide an
| oversized amount of peace of mind for me.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| None of those are significant problems in my life I
| guess, certainly not enough to justify even dedicating
| any space to a piece of electronic equipment that I will
| use infrequently enough to be frustrated by whatever way
| it has decided to not work when I do want to use it.
| Arubis wrote:
| If true, that's technically fascinating and clever.
|
| It's also the CEO of the company taking time from the
| shareholders to hunt down and hurt someone.
|
| Don't work for people like this.
| prepend wrote:
| I wonder about this stuff and expect they could also just look
| for a file of that exact size in bytes on work PCs or cloud
| storage.
|
| I think anyone who wants to write potentially career limiting
| things should exercise basic common sense like not using work
| computers and printers, removing fingerprinting elements, etc.
|
| In the future I expect more to do stuff like cut and paste
| between programs to alter the font and spacing before sharing.
|
| Or, of course, don't leak proprietary information. There are
| whisleblower protection laws for illegal material that can be
| revealed. But leaking random company stuff, I think leads to
| less info being shared by the company to employees.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| On a modern computer, all copying & pasting between programs
| would do is just create an exact trail of what is on your
| computer. Copy -> Paste is not metadata free by any means.
|
| If your final target was Notepad or similar, it should drop
| all the metadata. But in that case, just start with Notepad.
| smhoff256 wrote:
| Because we all know just how great those whistleblower laws
| protect people right? Right?
| jstarfish wrote:
| Whistleblower laws don't work out so well for those who
| _threaten_ to blow the whistle as a negotiating tactic.
|
| It's not retaliation if they fire you _before_ you make the
| disclosure...
| prepend wrote:
| I think they work out ok, I suppose. The big
| "whistleblowers" over the pas few years haven't actually
| been whistleblowers because they leaked confidential
| secrets. So Reality Winner, Chesley Manning, etc were
| convicted independent of any whistleblower laws.
|
| And why Snowden had to do an illegal act to reveal.
|
| But I think these scenarios are totally different from
| these Twitter leaks where there's no whistleblowing or
| illegal activity revealed.
|
| But I think there are tons of examples where the law worked
| and whistleblowers were protected and even financially
| rewarded, https://www.phillipsandcohen.com/successful-
| cases/
| mandeepj wrote:
| > It's been a few years since I read the book so a couple of
| the details may be off, but that was the gist of the story
|
| I read the book but did not remember that part. So, I searched
| it. You almost wrote verbatim. What are the chances a leaker(s)
| would print before leaking? Very low or none. So, that practice
| has very slim chances of success. The one in the tweet is a bit
| better. But has a escape route. Either - try to grammatically
| correct or paraphrase - it before leaking.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Let's say a person was aware that tracing in this manner was
| possible but they still needed to use the office printer. What
| if they wrote a letter and also added pages of other additional
| paragraphs. They print all those pages but only mail the one
| page and shred the rest. This would show a much bigger file kb-
| wise in the printer log and would not get caught.
| [deleted]
| dsq wrote:
| Just looking at the title I had a sudden vision of Mr Spock
| helping Elon by using the computer visor...
| goalieca wrote:
| Clever but easy to work around now that everyone knows the trick.
| techdragon wrote:
| Even easier now major operating systems can just OCR a
| screenshot. Instant clip a text block and by bye white space...
| so long tracking spaces, good riddance.
| Sakos wrote:
| Until major operating systems start automatically
| watermarking the results ...
| illys wrote:
| "... everyone knows the trick"...
|
| Everyone who read the tweet or commented here at this current
| point in time.
|
| Not sure most people who might be future leakers of classified
| stuff and targetted by this trick will be aware of it.
| abirch wrote:
| Someone working at the NSA:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner didn't realize
| that each printout had a unique signature printed on it. In
| general be paranoid but don't expect everyone to be careful.
| jp42 wrote:
| I'm sure there must be advance techniques to catch
| leakers...spaces and characters is quite old, though it still
| works if one is not careful.
| hirundo wrote:
| Now that this is known they'll need an approach that can survive
| retyping, like word choice and order. That can be defeated by
| rephrasing but requires even more work, and is somewhat
| identifying of the rephraser.
|
| If you find a corporate document with a lot of weird sounding
| word choices and ordering ... it's probably just written by
| someone not great with the language.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| This would be a good use of GPT-3: take a leaked document and
| rephrase it so that the original is not identifiable, while
| keeping the meaning the same.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Musk has significant fingers in OpenAI: if you use the API to
| do this, I wonder if he'd find you in the logs?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Bold of you to assume people will use OpenAI for this. They
| fortunately no longer have a monopoly on useful AI.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| GPT-3, the suggestion in OP, is specifically OpenAI. It
| is true that GPT-NeoX or OPT-175b would not have the same
| issue.
| barrkel wrote:
| Round trip it through a translation service.
| alhirzel wrote:
| relevant - https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs/hiatus
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Or just a thesaurus (which is already a technique in use).
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| As long as the leaker doesn't copy-paste the original and
| start replacing words. They'll have to clean up all the
| hidden chars and spaces too, then pull out the thesaurus as
| a last step.
| macNchz wrote:
| I bet that a couple of passes through random different
| languages on Google Translate would keep the text
| comprehensible but be sufficiently nondeterministic to
| accomplish this in just a few clicks.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| "I think that some translations from different languages
| in Google Translate will make the text understandable,
| but not clear enough to achieve this with just a few
| clicks."
|
| (English -> Turkish -> Hmong -> Xhosa -> English)
| germandiago wrote:
| Well done. :) Congrats Tesla.
| tablespoon wrote:
| If they actually did this, it's nice that they leaked their
| playbook.
|
| Advice for future leakers:
|
| 1. Ask your co-worker to forward you that email (because you
| "accidentally deleted it"), and diff to your copy, so you know if
| your employer is cosplaying as the CIA.
|
| 2. Retype everything before leaking or leak crappy photos of
| documents on your screen (or better yet, both).
|
| 3. Leak to a journalist and make them promise to only describe or
| quote the documents you're sharing, and not sure the literal
| files. A lot of this CIA cosplay won't work without access to the
| leaked file.
| fragmede wrote:
| ask your work nemesis to forward you the email and just leak
| that wholesale
| ianferrel wrote:
| This will work right up until they check the mail logs and/or
| your work nemesis says "oh yeah, I forwarded it to Bob."
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| Now you just need to ensure that you're not named Bob, and
| you're good.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Microfilm cameras if _you_ want to cosplay as the CIA too
| mjevans wrote:
| Mostly not necessary these days; everyone is already expected
| to have a portable supercomputer with a radio, passible
| quality camera, microphone, and shitty text input
| capabilities in their pocket.
| boringg wrote:
| Can I point out if you are going to leak something from your
| company you should probably be a lot smarter about it. Maybe it's
| me but I would be very paranoid about breaking trust with
| someone/company. Probably a personality thing though.
| croes wrote:
| What if someone spottet some space characters and deleted them?
|
| I do if I see double spaces.
|
| Or is it about printed documents?
| virtualritz wrote:
| There are thin spaces, hair spaces etc. in unicode. Multiple of
| those will just look like a normal space.
|
| Only if you tried to select them one by one would you become
| aware. But that's not what people usually do when they C&P a
| block of text
|
| That said: not sure how they will look in a text-only (no
| WYSIWYG) editor or a mail client set to display raw text.
| myself248 wrote:
| Or just paste into Notepad first and then copy from there to
| the destination. I find myself doing that as a quick-and-easy
| way to strip formatting, but it also knocks out a lot of
| weird characters.
|
| The luxuries of living in iso-latin-1, I suppose.
| upofadown wrote:
| Just checked and emacs running in a terminal displays the
| different sorts of spaces in unicode as a single space with
| an underline. I think that a goal for any sort of a text
| editor intended for programming should be to mark possibly
| problematic text somehow.
|
| Mutt just shows them all as spaces...
| gmjosack wrote:
| ~10 years ago I discovered Google doing steganography and their
| e-mails by accident. I was searching gmail for an e-mail message
| using a word I knew was definitely in the message but it was not
| being found. Eventually I found the e-mail and confirmed the word
| was definitely there. Ctrl+F and type the word, it's not found.
| Turned out there were random Cyrillic characters mixed through
| the message. Confirmed with others their messages similarly had
| random Cyrillic characters, but different from my own.
|
| Always found it ironic that their own products (gmail/chrome)
| gave away their attempts at steganography.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| What's the context of this? Were/are you a Googler and this was
| in internal emails? Or was this just emails Google sends to
| customers? (I'm choosing to assume that this isn't about random
| emails other people send to Gmail addresses, that Google just
| messes with this way.)
| gmjosack wrote:
| Yea, this was for internal communication, presumably to catch
| leaks. I've not worked there for 10 years now so I can't
| speak to whether they're still doing anything like this
| internally but I wouldn't be surprised.
| myself248 wrote:
| > discovered Google doing steganography and their e-mails by
| accident
|
| discovered by accident that Google was doing steganography in
| their e-mails
| daveslash wrote:
| Frankly, I like the idea that they were _accidentally
| performing_ steganography.
| bkishan wrote:
| Also worth noting that this did not work out, because their
| general counsel accidentally replied all to the email, giving
| everyone in the company a safe copy to leak.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| That is too funny. Reply all strikes again.
| thombat wrote:
| "Reply-all" suggests that the same mail went to a set of
| recipients, but doesn't the watermarking strategy require each
| recipient to have their own unique copy?
| pxx wrote:
| The "to" line is just a header and you can put whatever you
| want. The actual recipient is specified out of band (RCPT
| TO). This is how "bcc" works.
|
| Likely the To: line is some sort of mailing list in this
| case. The mailing list watermarks when redelivering to
| everybody. The To line remains unchanged. A reply-all causes
| one copy to be leaked (but it might be re-watermarked,
| depending on configuration...) Edit: A reply further down
| says it was actually a forward which does seem more likely,
| but nothing about the original setup is impossible.
| ilyt wrote:
| Recipient A gets their personalized copy, as does recipient B
|
| Recipient A then clicks reply-all, now everyone has copy that
| was personalized to A. They might even notice subtle
| differences between them.
| thombat wrote:
| But how did recipient A get a personalised copy if the mail
| with that copy was sent to a list of recipients?
|
| Edit: WP has the Tesla story with the counsel forwarding
| his copy to everyone in a new mail (presumably trying to be
| helpful?) So not a case of reply-all disease
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
| Shish2k wrote:
| > But how did recipient A get a personalised copy if the
| mail with that copy was sent to a list of recipients?
|
| Watermarking added by the mailing-list manager software?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Email round one: individually-watermarked copies are
| delivered to individually-addressed individuals. More
| elaborate systems might watermark such emails en-route,
| though that's ... less likely. A and B each wind up with
| individually-identifying copies of the email.
|
| Email round two: A _REPLIES ALL_ to _their_ individually-
| watermarked copy of the email, delivering it to _ALL_
| employees (or some nontrivially large sample), by which B
| _AND EVERY OTHER RECIPIENT_ now contains A 's watermarked
| copy.
|
| Email round three: B _OR ANY OTHER RECIPIENT OF A 's
| REPLY ALL_ can now leak A's watermarked copy of the
| email. Watermarking _NO LONGER_ identifies the leaker.
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| But in this case recipient B must have already had that
| one, as they were in the reply all for recipient A. If you
| sent me a personalized email and send it only to me, then
| my reply all isn't going to give my personalized version to
| anyone else but you- and presumably you trust yourself not
| to be the leak.
| niklasrde wrote:
| Reply-All would not include any other recipient in a
| standard, personalised mail out - unless the "To" or "Cc"
| fields were manipulated to give the impression that
| personalised email A went to everyone equally, but I think
| that would probably require some custom mailserver tweaks?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _doesn 't the watermarking strategy require each recipient to
| have their own unique copy?_
|
| That is indeed the precise and exact point.
| williamsmj wrote:
| Correct. Like many credulously repeated stories about Musk 1)
| the source for this one is Musk himself 2) the description that
| he gave, and that gets repeated in viral posts, is an extremely
| easily disproven lie.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap#In_popular_culture
|
| "After a series of leaks at Tesla Motors in 2008, CEO Elon Musk
| reportedly sent slightly different versions of an e-mail to
| each employee in an attempt to reveal potential leakers. The
| e-mail was disguised as a request to employees to sign a new
| non-disclosure agreement. The plan was undermined when the
| company's general counsel forwarded his own unique version of
| the e-mail with the attached agreement. As a result, Musk's
| scheme was realized by employees who now had a safe copy to
| leak."
| onion2k wrote:
| Good way to cover your ass if the general counsel is the one
| doing the leaks...
| jmbwell wrote:
| Years ago, I worked at a place that attempted this. They were so
| giddy about it. There wasn't even a known leak, or, arguably,
| anything particularly worth leaking. They were just tickled by
| the idea that they could gotcha anyone who tried to leak
| something.
|
| Then, as now, it strikes me as little more than sad and paranoid
| Tom Clancy cosplay.
|
| I'd like to say I've moved on to a place with a culture of trust
| and faithfulness, but it doesn't seem like anyone really trusts
| anyone anywhere anymore, and recent general infatuation with
| petty lords of chaos doesn't seem to be helping.
|
| So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage.
| robomartin wrote:
| > So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage.
|
| Espionage isn't a fantasy, it's very much real. People go to
| jail for it all the time. The only question is to what degree
| might a company be affected or targeted. Taking steps to add a
| reasonable layer of security to attempt to protect costly IP
| isn't being paranoid at all. Not to mention that in some
| environments there are legal requirements, a prime example
| being aerospace.
|
| We have had the experience of having an employee provide
| confidential technical information to a multi-billion dollar
| international competitor. The same competitor that, for as long
| as a year, bribed top resellers not to feature our products at
| industry trade shows. Business can be absolutely brutal and,
| yes, it can be war.
| bradjohnson wrote:
| Your particular example wouldn't be deterred from the tactics
| that Elon says that he used, though. If it's not leaked to
| the public it wouldn't be seen by those that encoded an
| identifier into it.
| nickff wrote:
| But it would be discoverable and traceable in the case of
| legal proceedings.
| bradjohnson wrote:
| If they kept the original correspondence then it would
| anyway. Plus this wouldn't be legally binding in a court
| room when Elon runs in and is like "I think the spaces
| match the one that I sent to this employee." That is not
| enough evidence to say that the employee did it when it
| is trivial for the ploy to be subverted by another
| employee just inserting a space in a random place.
| aksss wrote:
| defense in layers. no single mechanism wins the trophy.
| bradjohnson wrote:
| Shaming tactics are orthogonal to defense, especially
| when the only way this succeeds is when nobody thinks the
| CEO is paranoid enough to try it. If anyone is leaking
| private memos from an Elon company now, it is trivial to
| disrupt this by reformatting the document and rephrasing
| sentences.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| >it doesn't seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere
| anymore
|
| No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're
| just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of
| trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I
| needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from
| the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust
| my wife or friends.
|
| My company is hardly some "golden child", but it generally does
| right by its staff, and the staff, more or less, does right by
| the company. Things aren't _perfect_ , but I would say the
| amount of inter-office trust is about as close as anyone would
| reasonably expect. Problems pop up, but with a healthy amount
| of addressing things head on, those problems don't rot and
| fester.
|
| Need someone to be honest with you about the deadline of an
| upcoming project? Done.
|
| Need to get a hold of someone off-hours on a three day weekend?
| Alright, as long as it's something important and time
| sensitive.
|
| Need realistic feedback about a presentation you're working on.
| Sure.
|
| It all revolves around mutual respect, camaraderie, and clearly
| defined roles. When I see an upcoming issue with an area I have
| nothing to do with, I don't feel the need to fix it "because no
| one else will", but, I also don't leave it to blow up in
| someone else's face either. I let the right people know, or
| tell my boss if I'm not sure who should be involved.
|
| If I had to take a guess, maybe you work for one of those
| larger corporate type companies with lots of middle managers,
| office politics, etc.? I'd encourage you to look at getting
| away from that if it's weighing heavily on your ability to
| trust others. It's something that I dealt with for a length of
| time, and once I moved onto a smaller shop, the ability to
| trust and genuinely _rely_ on others improved quite a bit.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I started out work in a shop with a terrible, toxic work
| environment. Micromanaging, power-hungry, abusive management
| begat gossiping, uncaring, deceptive, and selfish labor...
| you learned to just keep your head down and let the shit
| slide off your shoulders like water off a duck's back. Keep
| your wits about you when something went behind schedule,
| though, because the blame game was about to get serious. I
| took to taking long walks on my lunch break - 28 minutes out,
| plan for 28 minutes back for some breathing room, because you
| were entitled to a 1-hour lunch break and would get shouted
| at for punching in and out with a 61-minute lunch hour - just
| to clear my head.
|
| Now I'm at a shop that's _miles_ better than the first.
| Management probably cares too much, treating labor better
| than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and
| transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn 't result in
| blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys
| if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human
| mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got
| a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory
| switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes
| south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to
| keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers'
| favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they
| know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with
| integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not
| nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore
| them when the machine is out of warranty.
|
| The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation
| of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly
| built up over decades could be quite effectively and
| profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the
| board or management. They could probably turn the screws and
| push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our
| abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover
| and customers realized that our culture had changed.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Yep, unfortunately it's incredibly hard to put value on
| those intangibles.
|
| And what's worse, being a hard nosed asshole is expected
| behaviour from executives, even if it's uncalled for or
| actively harmful to the company.
|
| I knew a guy fresh out of MBA school who proudly told
| everyone I worked with that if they didn't like what he
| asked them to do, he'd sack them. Despite the fact that
| these people had specific training, were good at what they
| did, and understood how best to do their jobs.
|
| His attitude really made me think about the value of
| individuals in a company - and showed me exactly how not to
| do things in the future.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I worked for most of my career, at an "old-fashioned"
| Japanese corporation, and the level of Personal Integrity in
| the company was phenomenal. It was not "touchy-feely" nice,
| but people were honest (when they were yelling at you), and
| weren't playing games. Everyone was focused on creating great
| stuff.
|
| I just took it for granted, but that environment was a bit of
| a "silo." When I left that company, and started to interact
| with today's tech culture, it was ... _quite a letdown_.
|
| It seems that most executives are fairly sketchy people,
| these days, and they set a culture that is mimicked by the
| folks that work for them.
|
| I guess that it's always been like that, but it seems a lot
| worse, these days.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Fair comments. I'm not at a huge org, but I am in an industry
| not known for its optimism. I myself am not particularly
| optimistic lately. Maybe I should be!
| registeredcorn wrote:
| Dang, sorry to hear that. I do hope things improve for you!
| :)
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Oh, sure. Me too. And then someone I trusted utterly fucked
| me over. Like six figure fucked me over.
|
| So consider that your trust, your opinion, is based on the
| past, and you have no actual idea what will happen in the
| future, or tomorrow even.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Yet I can't really fault a company for trying to hold people
| accountable for breaking their terms of employment.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I can. It's a waste of time and easily defeated if anyone
| realizes. Once secret is known, its easy to frame innocent
| coworkers by twiddling spaces.
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| Employees should be responsible and have a duty to their
| employer. But it's important to decide if enforcement is
| appropriate and helpful. It hurts employee morale to be
| distrusted like this.
|
| If the secrets being guarded are life or death for the
| company, then some extra measures may be appropriate. But if
| they're normal corporate "secrets" the harms of enforcement
| will be worse than a leak.
| mattferderer wrote:
| Curious if anyone realized this early & either:
|
| * tried to sabotage other employees at random by modifying
| their letter & leaking it
|
| * tried to sabotage a specific employee by getting their unique
| copy & leaking it
|
| The risk/reward for a company here seems very poor. I would
| imagine this blows up in the face of the company often.
| Mr_Modulo wrote:
| If you can get a copy from another employee then they are in
| trouble for not securing private communications.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| > They were so giddy about it.
|
| This makes no sense. Why would they tell everyone what their
| measures were?
| jmbwell wrote:
| Well, they didn't tell everyone. I was simply, as they say,
| familiar with the plan.
| timbo1642 wrote:
| lake_vincent wrote:
| Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard
| work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not
| _actually_ merged with robots yet, and we still have human
| needs.
|
| If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand,
| you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer
| period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking
| and just give people what they need to produce great work.
|
| You get slightly slower growth, but more area under the curve
| in the long run.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work"
|
| And Musk is the perfect example of "do as I say, not as I
| do", as he sends teams into a death march of insane hours,
| wherever he is, while he's shitposting on Twitter from his
| multi million dollar house paid for by company funds and
| pretending he's doing 120 hour work weeks
| rapsey wrote:
| To produce great work you also need some pressure. Otherwise
| people will get real lazy very quickly.
| htgb wrote:
| Counterpoint: open source software, of which there are many
| great works without anyone being forced or pressured into
| making it. There are many more ways of getting motivation
| than applying "some pressure". Indeed, people are
| inherently curious and motivated, but it can easily be
| suppressed by environmental factors. In particular "stick
| and carrot"-type reward systems.
|
| For a (much more) elaborate expansion on this, see the book
| Drive by Daniel H. Pink.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| We barely recently got decent open source computers (but
| not smartphones), now try to imagine a GPL car...
|
| That said it wouldn't it be cool have some sort of open
| source VW Bug. Stainless steel cyberbug, EV for the
| people. Low tech, curb lasts whole century, ubiquitous
| parts.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > That said it wouldn't it be cool have some sort of open
| source VW Bug. Stainless steel cyberbug, EV for the
| people. Low tech, curb lasts whole century, ubiquitous
| parts.
|
| AWS would just fork it, package it as a SaaS, give
| nothing back to the project and it would then slowly
| atrophy and cease to exist.
| rapsey wrote:
| The vast majority of open source done in peoples free
| time is unfinished and at best of limited use. The
| serious projects very often have payed developers. The
| good ones done by unpaid developers have some pressure in
| terms of expectations by their community or the
| developers put pressure on themselves to achieve some
| self goal.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| OSS projects are also prone to leadership issues and tend
| to have "good ol boys" clubs. It's utlimately human
| nature, OSS or not. See Linus Torvals or some of the
| things that went on in Rust community. Also,
| StackOverflow mods that volunteer their free time have so
| many issues. Wikipedia editors and Reddit moderators.
| Same.
|
| Putting a OSS lipstick isn't doing any favors to
| understanding the human nature and how to create a good
| governance model to keep people happy. I suspect this is
| never going to be "solved", only solved in one person's
| views or ideological bias.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| You are quite right that open source done purely in free
| time usually takes much longer to be "finished" but that
| is more a question of the time available to spend on it
| than absence of pressure.
|
| OSS projects that have paid developers often manage to
| avoid much of the pressure that occurs in closed source.
|
| Some OSS projects like the kernel manage to harness
| companies as way of funding full time developers without
| giving them too much say in details or deadlines. A
| feature ships in Linux when it is ready and accepted by
| the maintainers and Linus not when some manager says it
| has to ship.
|
| Of course this works far better for large projects that
| are essentially a "commons" like the kernel, less so for
| open source projects where most of the developers work
| for a single company.
| jasec57322 wrote:
| All this musk-style motivation 101 BS is direct from the
| CIA's manual on domestic espionage - frustration from
| within.
|
| The means define the ends. If you treat people like shit,
| or as morons who need BS pressure techniques, you'll get
| a demoralised company.
|
| Treat people well, set them clear targets and say it
| without fluff when they're slacking. If you can't tell
| somebody they're not good enough, you cannot help them to
| be good enough. None of this psychobabble BS where you're
| constantly second-guessing in a failed attempt to retain
| them on the rat-race for the rest of their life. Stop
| building ratrace companies.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Stop building ratrace companies
|
| They build rat-races because they are all still rats at
| heart. Endemic crisis of leadership and vision bred men
| who cannot think outside the maze. No amount of climbing
| extended their horizons or released them from slavery to
| money and the misery it brings.
| lake_vincent wrote:
| Exactly, which is why I am advocating _precisely_ for
| giving people what they _need_. Some people _need_ pressure
| to perform optimally, others don 't. Some people _need_ to
| put in 80 hours of work per week, others don 't. It is
| simple and humane to approach it this way.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I think motivation is more important. Solving problems
| should be fun and engaging activity. There are always bad
| apples literally in every single company no matter how good
| or faithful their culture. So, there is no way around it.
|
| To give Elon credit, he does try to motivate people.
| Sleeping on the factory floor, doing more work than his
| subordinates, inspiring people about grand goals and "anti-
| bureacratic" philosophy - all contribute to motivation. He
| sent out an email to Tesla employees that literally said
| "If a rule becomes a Dilbert joke, then change the rule".
|
| I am trying to steelman Elon's way of governing and
| personally know several people at SpaceX that are not dying
| from overwork, but actually happy. I also have a few
| friends who couldn't stand SpaceX and quit within the first
| year.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Maybe he realizes that, and is just a jackass.
| whatwherewhy wrote:
| Where are the nice bosses of top tech companies? Maybe
| that's how you build a big tech company.
| Goronmon wrote:
| I think there is a middle area between being a "nice
| boss" and being a boss who calls out internal engineering
| implementation concerns (rightly or not) on Twitter. And
| then fire people who disagree in a response.
| whatwherewhy wrote:
| Well, Gates is an asshole, Jobs was an asshole - where's
| the middleground? Maybe niceness leads to [business]
| mediocrity.
| lake_vincent wrote:
| Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery
| doesn't mean that slavery is okay, or that there is not a
| better way to build a pyramid.
| bckr wrote:
| The pyramids were not built with slavery
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| how were they built?
| artificial wrote:
| By teams of people stacking enormous stones on top of one
| another. Fun fact, there's inscriptions by the teams:
| https://the-past.com/feature/records-of-the-pyramid-
| builders...
| whatwherewhy wrote:
| Don't be absurd, we are not talking about anything
| comparable to slavery.
|
| I am asking - show me the person who found the better
| way.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I suspect the world's wealthiest man knows how to grow a
| business better than either of us.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Stick the email into Google Translate, translate to Spanish and
| back, correcting any major mis-translations and Juan is your
| uncle .
| benburleson wrote:
| Or put your own space noise in the message to frame a
| coworker.
| LightG wrote:
| Toxic.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| why not take a photo of email, show only the header with some
| blur applied, but convert the image to text before publishing?
| evan_ wrote:
| Or just retype it
| rnk wrote:
| Microsoft used to do this. I worked in a startup with an exec a
| few years later and he admitted they did it. I think everyone
| does this. We had 10s of thousands of employees at Microsoft, and
| they'd send out these updates on windows status, like "the beta
| of the next release is coming in early January with these
| features". He said they could only vary it a little bit - I think
| it was spaces, maybe some dots, so an email to a large group
| would only have enough uniqueness to narrow it down to say 100
| people. This must have been an old idea. I couldn't believe those
| reporters were naive enough to give up Reality Winner's original
| printout.
| netsharc wrote:
| Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior
| attract toxic employees? I guess that seems to be the case, if
| you read about Uber under Kalanick, or employees crying in
| bathrooms at Amazon.
|
| Before that tweet the thread is talking about an email Musk sent:
|
| > Scoop: Elon Musk just sent an email to all staff outlining
| "Twitter 2.0", writing it will"need to be extremely hardcore".
| Long hours, high intensity.
|
| > People need to click "yes" to confirm being part of this by 5pm
| ET tomorrow, else they get 3 months severance. [...]
|
| Hah, "Click here to agree to a toxic workplace, or be fired"...
| jmeister wrote:
| Do you know what it's like in military organizations around the
| world and in history? Most men don't have a problem with
| authoritarian hierarchies as long as the hierarchy is justified
| in their view. Tech people are extremely coddled and clueless
| about how the rest of the world works and the moral intuitions
| of normal people.
|
| "The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and
| the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the
| power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the
| hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize
| and where both have their predetermined stable place."
|
| https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar...
| _djo_ wrote:
| Militaries that rely on volunteers rather than conscription
| absolutely don't get away with being completely authoritarian
| and treating regular soldiers terribly. They have to form a
| social contract of sorts, where people put up with some loss
| of autonomy in specific areas in return for other benefits
| like education or training, autonomy in other areas they
| might value more (like small team leadership), and decent
| service conditions. No service members tolerate regular and
| capricious abuse, and leaders found to do that seldom remain
| in post long. It's not a perfect system of course, but
| abusive behaviour by leadership is definitely the exception.
|
| Issues around service conditions regularly go all the way to
| Congress and get resolved quickly and sometimes expensively,
| because the alternative is being unable to recruit or retain
| personnel, and that would be disastrous for a military that's
| already having a tough time doing both.
|
| Let's not justify abusive leadership. There's never a need
| for it.
| 988747 wrote:
| It changes with age. Men in their teens/twenties are
| followers, by your mid-thirties you start to question things.
| mooner wrote:
| I'm past 40 and I see this in my workplace. All my
| colleagues who work long hours are in their 20s,
| particularly the fresh graduates who just joined. I try to
| gently tell them that they can just work their 7.5 hours
| per day and go home like us old guys, but they seem
| determined to burn the candle at both ends. Ah well,
| they'll learn - when they burn out.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Pretty sure that the rebellion starts in the teens, source:
| myself, all my friends and now my friends children.
| 988747 wrote:
| Yes, but this rebellion is against the PARENTS. Teenage
| kids typically seek for the new meaning and purpose in
| their lives, that's why so many college students join
| charities, or civil rights groups, or cults... And they
| do not join those groups as leaders, they start at the
| bottom.
| jmeister wrote:
| These days the rebellion starts from kindergarten
| apparently. There needs to be balance between
| understanding and respecting tradition, and questioning
| it. On one end you have Iran/Taliban, on the other you
| have modern USA. Galileo was right, and his persecutors
| were right too.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The military is a rather specialized scenario. "At-will
| employment", it's not.
| pjc50 wrote:
| We're _aware_ of that, but the past forty or so years of
| software development have been extremely anti-hierarchical -
| or the "hierarchy of one" / "benevolent dictator for life"
| flat structure.
|
| Hierarchy has its own failure modes. Into the valley of death
| rode the six hundred ..
| [deleted]
| memish wrote:
| "Click here to agree to an ambitious workplace".
|
| Like SpaceX, only the motivated will agree. That's a
| requirement for turning Twitter into a SpaceX or Tesla scale
| success.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Are you paid for your Musk cheerleading? I see you in every
| thread even tangentially Musk related white knighting for
| him. You cannot seem to accept a critical word said about the
| guy.
| memish wrote:
| Is that a thing? Are you paid for anti-Musk cheerleading?
| Is that a thing? I've never seen a job posting for either
| of those and it sounds soulless.
|
| I accept any cogent critique. Elon should not have called a
| cave diver a pedo. There's one. It's also not about him,
| it's just that the derangement is mostly directed at him at
| the moment and I'm responding to the derangement. The
| comments I respond to are not cogent critiques. They are
| kneejerk mob hate bandwagoning that are anti-success, anti-
| progress and anti-humanity. It's sad.
| netsharc wrote:
| > They are kneejerk mob hate bandwagoning that are anti-
| success, anti-progress and anti-humanity. It's sad.
|
| "Leave Elon alone!". Wow, grandparent commenter got you,
| you just gave us a glimpse of what you think of Daddy
| Elon... that he's this hero bringing success, progress
| and who'll save humanity. I'd say check your assumptions,
| but hey I guess this will fall on deaf cult member ears.
| memish wrote:
| I never said to leave him alone or that he's a hero or
| that he's the only one driving humanity forward or that
| he's perfect. Sometimes he's an asshole. Sometimes he's
| an idiot. He's flawed like every human.
|
| Your childish cult-like "spaceman bad" programming and
| angry projection of your daddy issues says more about you
| than anyone.
| netsharc wrote:
| Hey you think I'm a brainwashed cult member, and I think
| you're one, also with the projection issue. So... is this
| a Mexican stand-off?
| giantrobot wrote:
| > The comments I respond to are not cogent critiques.
| They are kneejerk mob hate bandwagoning that are anti-
| success, anti-progress and anti-humanity. It's sad.
|
| What's sad is seeing every critique of Musk as "anti-
| success, anti-progress and anti-humanity" or some sort of
| derangement against him. That is just absurd.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Identifying leaks is toxic? Overuse of the word is probably
| diluting its meaning.
| aniforprez wrote:
| The toxicity is the forced requirement to agree to work long
| crappy hours or be fired
| adrr wrote:
| Leaking documents is indicative of a a toxic environment
| where the trust has broken down in all directions.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Its like when they slip a note into your sneakers in the
| sweat shop factory begging for help.
|
| 12 year olds can be such piece of shit sometimes, cant they
| just be grateful they get paid 2c and got selected for the
| special 36 hour shift to make shoes for us?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If 0.00001% of the workforce leaks? Or does the % matter?
| dmix wrote:
| That's a strange take. There's tons of reasons why people
| leak things to the press besides: political/ideological
| concerns, employees who felt jilted, people who like the
| attention, reporters hitting up employees for information,
| etc etc.
|
| It's also far more likely to happen at a company that is a
| media darling where everything it does gets documented in
| papers around the world.
|
| So naturally there's tons of outside pressure for
| information to leak compared to typical orgs.
| xeromal wrote:
| I mean leaking could just be someone wanting to make a
| quick buck and selling secrets to a competitor.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Man, that sounds pretty sweet
|
| 3 months of severance, after a good 6+ month run of lame duck
| employment where the whole company didn't really do anything. I
| could take my time and buy a nice house out in the Midwest,
| then pick up an easy remote job for $100-150k
|
| I guess it's a different story if you dumped your life savings
| into a down payment and now you have to keep up with an $8000
| Bay Area mortgage though
| jjav wrote:
| > I could take my time and buy a nice house out in the
| Midwest
|
| You're not buying a house of any kind (let alone nice) with 3
| months severance after taxes and day to day living expenses.
| ezconnect wrote:
| Information is very valuable and companies goes to great
| lengths to protect them.
| sidibe wrote:
| > Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic
| behavior attract toxic employees?
|
| It attracts Elon devotees. It remains to be seen if they can be
| as good as regular SWEs. I highly doubt it
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Needing to be able to silently patch your vehicle's software
| without consumer consent or even knowledge is a tactic
| admission that you can't meet automotive industry software
| 'standards'.
|
| Tesla has pushed the "we do it to bring amazing things to
| your car!"...quietly distracting people from the "...we fuck
| things up so often we're constantly having to patch your car"
| man behind the curtain.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| As someone who drives a Tesla, by all means, fuck it up.
| Because it means it's at least actually being worked on.
|
| Once you're several years into owning a car, the outdated
| software really starts to show. Especially on mid-2010s
| cars where CarPlay and Android Auto weren't a thing, you're
| held back by _really_ old shitty software that will never
| be updated.
|
| That is one thing that Tesla has, without a doubt, got
| right. And you can tell because most major manufacturers
| are also going to an OTA update system, even though it
| obviously costs far more in infrastructure and completely
| re-engineering their existing systems to support it.
| mzs wrote:
| Some are probably trapped by their visa.
| chimen wrote:
| I have a special affinity for people using the term "toxic" in
| each of their arguments.
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| > Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic
| behavior attract toxic employees?
|
| A lot of money, perhaps? I'm not familiar with Tesla
| compensation levels, but this is the only reason I can think
| people may have to cope with this guy.
| hello639 wrote:
| >> Why do people still work at Tesla
|
| > A lot of money, perhaps?
|
| They work there for the mission, not the money.
|
| Tesla pays 100-150K USD for new grad SWE including stock
| options/RSU. For AI, it's about 150-200K.
|
| Or you can drive 15 minutes to Google and a SWE gets 200K and
| AI gets 200-250K. Or "sell out" and work in quant finance for
| 400-500K new grad SWE as a 22 year old.
|
| So no, people do not work at Tesla/SpaceX for the money.
|
| I have many friends at Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, and they
| complain how little they are paid, how they have no free
| time, and how they hope the name brand on their resume gets
| them a higher paying job some day. Looks like they bought
| Elon's bullshit.
| EricDeb wrote:
| Tesla stock has made unreal gains the past 10 years probably
| people are motivated by money
| d23 wrote:
| Twitter 2.0 will need to be "extremely hardcore." Truly a
| visionary.
| kernal wrote:
| I consider the removal of wine on tap extremely hardcore.
| Imagine rolling into the Twitter office at 10 am and not being
| able to fill your 2L Yeti mug with complimentary tap wine
| before the start of your day.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| For a fella who is CEO of THREE separate companies, he sure has a
| lot of time on his hands to do bullshit. Maybe he should have to
| work from the office.
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