181–190 of 448 posts
Google circa 2011~2012 used unicode homoglyphs in all-employee memos for the same purpose.
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 faithful…
>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends. My company is hardly some "…
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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.
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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.
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I can imagine that a company actually saves everything being printed for security / auditing reasons, along with who issued the print request, etc.
Doing that suggests they think that the threat from insiders >>> outsiders.
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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.
And I walk to a nearby copy shop for my printing needs. At maybe twice a year it's a rare enough occasion that I refuse to keep a printer myself.
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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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What are the odds that he calculated a certain number of bytes, and exactly one other employee had sent a file to the printer that contained that number, but it was just a coincidence? If the method indeed doesn't work (as you suggest "is possible") it's impossible it would turn up a false positive, only a false negative.
It's also possible that he calculated the number of bytes, searched the logs, didn't find anything and then tweaked his numbers until something matched. And then fired that random person to make a statement and lied about how he found out who to fire.
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 faithful…
>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends. My company is hardly some "…
Now I'm at a shop that's miles better than the first. Management probably cares too much, treating labor better than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn't result in blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers' favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore them when the machine is out of warranty.
The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly built up over decades could be quite effectively and profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the board or management. They could probably turn the screws and push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover and customers realized that our culture had changed.
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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.