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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

#91

Post by thombat »

ilyt wrote: post #81
thombat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

But how did recipient A get a personalised copy if the mail with that copy was sent to a list of recipients?

Edit: WP has the Tesla story with the counsel forwarding his copy to everyone in a new mail (presumably trying to be helpful?) So not a case of reply-all disease

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap

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

#92

Post by asdajksah2123 »

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.

Corporate networks tend to keep printer logs for extremely long durations.

Also, printers at home are incredibly useful. I'm surprised more people don't have them. Especially now that online shopping (and therefore online returns) are so much more common and require printing return labels.

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

#93

Post by 9991 »

egman_ekki wrote: post #44
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?

They could use typos in different words, though, right?

Or synonyms, or alternate grammar that’s functionally equivalent. Lots of better ways that are completely concealed, unless you see multiple drafts.

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

#94

Post by prepend »

xdavidliu wrote: post #62
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.

The Jobs story sounds quite similar to what Tyrion Lannister did to identify leaks in Game of Thrones. https://youtu.be/Di8Z7rJ9vnI

Tyrions plot has a flaw in that it’s three versions of the same story. If two or three betray him, he won’t know and he’ll reveal to the queen that something is afoot.

He should have used different stories.

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

#95

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

ilyt wrote: post #81
thombat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

But in this case recipient B must have already had that one, as they were in the reply all for recipient A. If you sent me a personalized email and send it only to me, then my reply all isn't going to give my personalized version to anyone else but you- and presumably you trust yourself not to be the leak.

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

#96

Post by aitchnyu »

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?

Paraphrasing would help identifying person by writing style, IIRC by leaking specialist. It could also erase hidden signals in the message.

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

#97

Post by gaius_baltar »

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?

A lot of money, perhaps? I'm not familiar with Tesla compensation levels, but this is the only reason I can think people may have to cope with this guy.

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

#98

Post by niklasrde »

ilyt wrote: post #81
thombat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Reply-All would not include any other recipient in a standard, personalised mail out - unless the "To" or "Cc" fields were manipulated to give the impression that personalised email A went to everyone equally, but I think that would probably require some custom mailserver tweaks?

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

njovin wrote: post #88
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.

[deleted]
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