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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

#81

Post by ilyt »

thombat wrote: post #61
bkishan wrote: post #25

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.

"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?

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.

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

#82

Post by selfhoster11 »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #79
unsupp0rted wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bold of you to assume people will use OpenAI for this. They fortunately no longer have a monopoly on useful AI.

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

#84

Post by vntok »

berkes wrote: post #67
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?

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.

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.

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

#85

Post by prepend »

greggsy wrote: post #23
staplung wrote: post #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.

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.

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.

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

#86

Post by bojan »

prepend wrote: post #73
brk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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.

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

#87

Post by kuschku »

biztos wrote: post #59
thathndude wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And this is why the media often can't actually show the original sources.

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

#88

Post by njovin »

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,…

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.

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

#89

Post by nailer »

greggsy wrote: post #23
staplung wrote: post #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.

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.

Likewise Coleen Rooney, a football player's wife, did this to unmask a gossip leaker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagatha_Christie

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

#90

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

bee_rider wrote: post #72
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?

Perhaps Musk's shoddy logic is what's currently pushing Twitter to the brink!
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