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Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

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Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#111

Post by asfasgasg »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #82
flyingswift wrote: post #65

I made this same comment on the other discussion. I find it concerning that one person was able to push malicious code to 'production'. To me, this suggests that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, does not employ basic branch policies. How is is it that these changes could have made it through a code review process and get deployed? If a company like Microsoft or Google announced that a disgruntled…

I would say it's like the difference between China and America having a major environmental accident - we treat developing economies and businesses differently from established ones.

Tesla was founded before Facebook, and I'd argue that Facebook would fall into the same category as Google or Microsoft on this question.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#112

Post by nickparker »

sanderjd wrote: post #100
cottsak wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very naive comment. There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. Ideally, with mature controls, the people in this list is short. But to jump to the conclusion that Tesla doesn't use good practises is very short sighted. Who's to say that external parties didn't target this person specifically because of their role/influe…

> There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. There is really no reason for this to be the case. Certainly all code that actually runs on the car can be required to go through review and be verifiably built, even if server code standards are more lax.

The code in question is for their manufacturing systems, not the cars.

Not that that's necessarily better... Manufacturing equipment's at about the same danger tier as cars.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#113

Post by tehwebguy »

sanderjd wrote: post #100
cottsak wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very naive comment. There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. Ideally, with mature controls, the people in this list is short. But to jump to the conclusion that Tesla doesn't use good practises is very short sighted. Who's to say that external parties didn't target this person specifically because of their role/influe…

> There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. There is really no reason for this to be the case. Certainly all code that actually runs on the car can be required to go through review and be verifiably built, even if server code standards are more lax.

> This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames

If they found a way to use more than one username they may very well have run it through the review process and approved it themselves

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#114

Post by manicdee »

neotek wrote: post #108
gwern wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we'll see how serious they are about these accusations if they sue the employee or file criminal charges; if the industrial espionage & sabotage accusations are true, it should be easy to make them stick - and having told the whole company about them, Musk now needs to take action or else forfeit credibility & deterrence (both for not being a liar, and for punishing theft/sabotage).

The fact Musk still has any credibility at all given his penchant for making wild claims that inevitably fall flat is baffling to me. How many more spurious predictions and imaginary milestones does he need to pump out before people recognise him for the huckster monorail salesman that he is?

For a huckster he’s doing a damn good job of fake shipping fake cars to fake customers who fake drive them in fake public. Excellent scam, would invest again.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#115

Post by venning »

anonu wrote: post #83
ucaetano wrote: post #34

We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don't love the idea of T…

I wouldn't suggest this to be paranoia. It's simply reality. Wall Street profits from the stock cratering right now. Its not unfathomable that some hedge fund would go to extreme lengths to embed a mole into the Tesla team to cause sabotage. There's a (mediocre) documentary on Netflix about Bill Ackman's famous Herbalife short. In there they detail the hundreds of $1000 spent just defending his short position through…

> the hundreds of $1000 spent just defending his short position through hiring former Herbalife people, funding legal campaigns, funding support groups

You are describing entirely legal actions. Sabotage and (this form of) industrial espionage are very much illegal. There's quite a difference there.

> a few $100k is pocket change for these guys

But a few billion dollars of market cap and a few years of jail time are the price of being found guilty of what Musk is insinuating.

That's not a small leap.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#116

Post by jon_richards »

ucaetano wrote: post #34

We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don't love the idea of T…

>Most of the time, when there is theft of goods, leaking of confidential information, dereliction of duty or outright sabotage, the reason really is something simple like wanting to get back at someone within the company or at the company as a whole. Occasionally, it is much more serious.

Literally the next paragraph. It would be irresponsible of him not to look into the possibility.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#117

Post by jaggederest »

zxcmx wrote: post #28
prepend wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company only allows authenticated users to commit changes. Even pull requests on our public repos get scanned and reviewed before human review. And pull requests are infrequent enough that unknown users usually involve some interaction. It seems like if an organization is allowing randos to push changes, they would also allow randos with valid pgp to push changes as well. So the investigation would change to “Who…

What you might not realise is that the author of a commit is not related to the (authenticated) user who pushes. You couldn’t merge changes from multiple people otherwise. Signed commits do fix this although you have to be careful about your threat model. Lots of software (e.g. gitlab) will prevent alice from pretending to be bob but will not protect you against server compromise (because public key directory and sig…

Github signs merge commits FWIW. They're pretty good about it.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#118

Post by brightball »

neotek wrote: post #108
gwern wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we'll see how serious they are about these accusations if they sue the employee or file criminal charges; if the industrial espionage & sabotage accusations are true, it should be easy to make them stick - and having told the whole company about them, Musk now needs to take action or else forfeit credibility & deterrence (both for not being a liar, and for punishing theft/sabotage).

The fact Musk still has any credibility at all given his penchant for making wild claims that inevitably fall flat is baffling to me. How many more spurious predictions and imaginary milestones does he need to pump out before people recognise him for the huckster monorail salesman that he is?

You did see him launch his car into space, right?

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#119

Post by colordrops »

ucaetano wrote: post #34

We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don't love the idea of T…

You've got to be kidding right? One could easily create a list of 1000s of instances of corruption and corporate warfare in the US. And in China it's worse by a couple orders of magnitude, and more visible.

Millions of people have been murdered over money let alone sabotaging a company.

Lets not call others paranoid when it's actually naivety of these problems that is the issue.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#120

Post by SolarNet »

sanderjd wrote: post #100
cottsak wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very naive comment. There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. Ideally, with mature controls, the people in this list is short. But to jump to the conclusion that Tesla doesn't use good practises is very short sighted. Who's to say that external parties didn't target this person specifically because of their role/influe…

> There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. There is really no reason for this to be the case. Certainly all code that actually runs on the car can be required to go through review and be verifiably built, even if server code standards are more lax.

I think you misunderstand. Even with code review policies, there is still a short list of people who can push to production without going through code review. Not from a policy standpoint but from a security and access perspective.
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