Live data from Hacker News

Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

twitter.com

11–20 of 448 posts

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#12
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.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#14
post #8

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 intensi…

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...

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#15
post #8

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 intensi…

Identifying leaks is toxic? Overuse of the word is probably diluting its meaning.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#16
post #4

Clever but easy to work around now that everyone knows the trick.

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.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#17
post #5

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.

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.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#18
post #8

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 intensi…

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…

It changes with age. Men in their teens/twenties are followers, by your mid-thirties you start to question things.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#19
post #8

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 intensi…

Information is very valuable and companies goes to great lengths to protect them.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#20
post #8

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 intensi…

> 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

Post reply on HN