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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

#111

Post by Someone »

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.

The OP talks about the size in kilobytes, not bytes. That will almost certainly give false positives, but if you limit the time range, it may not be that bad.

Not a bad idea for initial filtering, I think, but I doubt it would hold up in court on itself.

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

#112

Post by bloak »

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's often a good idea to check for weird characters in a text file. Something like this:

cat file.txt | perl -C63 -pe '$_ = join("\n", split(//, $_));' | sort | uniq -c

I've found lots of errors that way: BOMs in the middle of a file, different kinds of dash, quotation marks or brackets that don't match, ...

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

#113

Post by courgette »

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.

Same here, maybe Tesla as a homogeneous word deployment?

I’m sure between various version there is difference in what is produced.

Unless you can ask word for the equivalent of a postscript ?

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

#114

Post by pwg »

vntok wrote: post #84
berkes wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> However it will add almost invisible markings onto the paper itself

That only happens on color printers. It is called Machine Identification Code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code).

Supposedly the reason is to trap currency counterfeiters.

Black and white printers do not add such dots.

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

#115

Post by moron4hire »

fooqux wrote: post #101
njovin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He searched the printer logs . Presumably when Word sends stuff to the printer, it doesn't bother with all the extraneous garbage it puts in files. Printer communication hasn't changed much in decades.

It is also possible he's just a lunatic who fired an innocent person.

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

#116

Post by jmbwell »

Years ago, I worked at a place that attempted this. They were so giddy about it. There wasn’t even a known leak, or, arguably, anything particularly worth leaking. They were just tickled by the idea that they could gotcha anyone who tried to leak something.

Then, as now, it strikes me as little more than sad and paranoid Tom Clancy cosplay.

I’d like to say I’ve moved on to a place with a culture of trust and faithfulness, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore, and recent general infatuation with petty lords of chaos doesn’t seem to be helping.

So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage.

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

#117

Post by EricDeb »

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…

Tesla stock has made unreal gains the past 10 years probably people are motivated by money

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

#118

Post by rtkwe »

bojan wrote: post #86
prepend wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I swapped over to a laser printer for that exact reason. There's still a few things a year I need to print and the laser printer stays working through the lulls where I always had issues with inkjets clogging up.

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

#119

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]

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

#120

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

asdajksah2123 wrote: post #92
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.

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.

I have occasion to actually need to print something about twice a year. I don't know how it is that we live such drastically different lifestyles that you find them so incredibly useful.
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