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Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

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

#51

Post by KennyBlanken »

sidibe wrote: post #20
netsharc wrote: 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

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.

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

#52

Post by alhirzel »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #17
hirundo wrote: 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.

relevant - https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs/hiatus

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

#53

Post by chimen »

netsharc wrote: 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…

I have a special affinity for people using the term "toxic" in each of their arguments.

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

#54

Post by mirages »

_wolfie_ wrote: post #36
djohnston wrote: post #2

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?

Yep. It was used in EVE: Online multiple times :)

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)

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

#55

Post by thathndude »

amelius wrote: post #33
greggsy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

This is why any reputable journalist/leaker takes the information and reproduces it prior to any dissemination (hopefully destroying the original source material).

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

#56

Post by mynameisvlad »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #51
sidibe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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.

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.

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

#57

Post by Sakos »

techdragon wrote: post #16
goalieca wrote: 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.

Until major operating systems start automatically watermarking the results ...

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

#59

Post by biztos »

thathndude wrote: post #55
amelius wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This is why any reputable journalist/leaker takes the information and reproduces it prior to any dissemination (hopefully destroying the original source material).

Wouldn’t the “leakee” then be able to say you just made it up?

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

#60

Post by FartyMcFarter »

hash872 wrote: post #43

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,…

Printing out whistleblower letters using work hardware is not a smart idea...
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