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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

#71

Post by prepend »

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,…

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.

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

#72

Post by bee_rider »

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,…

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?

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

#73

Post by prepend »

brk wrote: post #68
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,…

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.

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/

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

#74

Post by vntok »

josefresco wrote: post #65

What's the best process to strip these hidden characters? Is the an app, or web service that will "clean" the copy?

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.

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

#76

Post by smhoff256 »

prepend wrote: post #71
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,…

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 spa…

Because we all know just how great those whistleblower laws protect people right? Right?

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

#77

Post by jmeister »

themaninthedark wrote: post #26
988747 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pretty sure that the rebellion starts in the teens, source: myself, all my friends and now my friends children.

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.

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

#79

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

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.

Musk has significant fingers in OpenAI: if you use the API to do this, I wonder if he'd find you in the logs?

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

#80

Post by shapefrog »

adrr wrote: post #45
mensetmanusman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Leaking documents is indicative of a a toxic environment where the trust has broken down in all directions.

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?

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