171–180 of 448 posts
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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.
I can imagine that a company actually saves everything being printed for security / auditing reasons, along with who issued the print request, etc.
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?
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As long as the leaker doesn't copy-paste the original and start replacing words. They'll have to clean up all the hidden chars and spaces too, then pull out the thesaurus as a last step.
I bet that a couple of passes through random different languages on Google Translate would keep the text comprehensible but be sufficiently nondeterministic to accomplish this in just a few clicks.
(English -> Turkish -> Hmong -> Xhosa -> English)
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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
Watermarking added by the mailing-list manager software?
From Wikipedia: After a series of leaks at Tesla Motors in 2008, CEO Elon Musk reportedly sent slightly different versions of an e-mail to each employee in an attempt to reveal potential leakers. The e-mail was disguised as a request to employees to sign a new non-disclosure agreement. The plan was undermined when the company's general counsel forwarded his own unique version of the e-mail with the attached agreement…
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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.
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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.
> everybody has at least 1 printer at home why would anyone have more than one at home?
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,…
This is called parallel construction. The story as told didn't actually happen IMO.
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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.
It's pretty well known that map makers do this, adding non-existent small localities to detect when someone is blindly copying their work.