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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

#191

Post by hello639 »

gaius_baltar wrote: post #97
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.

>> Why do people still work at Tesla

> A lot of money, perhaps?

They work there for the mission, not the money.

Tesla pays 100-150K USD for new grad SWE including stock options/RSU. For AI, it’s about 150-200K.

Or you can drive 15 minutes to Google and a SWE gets 200K and AI gets 200-250K. Or “sell out” and work in quant finance for 400-500K new grad SWE as a 22 year old.

So no, people do not work at Tesla/SpaceX for the money.

I have many friends at Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, and they complain how little they are paid, how they have no free time, and how they hope the name brand on their resume gets them a higher paying job some day. Looks like they bought Elon’s bullshit.

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

#192

Post by dagmx »

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,…

Not to be a party pooper , but afaik this story didn’t happen and has actually been told for years attributed to various different people and agencies.

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

#193

Post by Symbiote »

Asdrubalini wrote: post #167
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?

Just use a for loop in Python over all characters and ignore each char that is not in the ASCII range of letters, numbers and punctuation. Or retype by hand if you don't know Python.

    cat document | tr -dc '[A-Za-z0-9.,!@$%*()/?" -]'

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

#194

Post by williamsmj »

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.

Correct. Like many credulously repeated stories about Musk 1) the source for this one is Musk himself 2) the description that he gave, and that gets repeated in viral posts, is an extremely easily disproven lie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap#In_popular_culture

"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. As a result, Musk's scheme was realized by employees who now had a safe copy to leak."

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

#196

Post by Firmwarrior »

brookst wrote: post #135
fooqux wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Still. He’d have to have the same normal.dot, make the same space/tab choices, same fonts, etc. And in a large company, how many ~1 page letters get printed? What are the odds that there is only a single match in the entire company? I take this story similar to the binary coded space story: more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter future leakers than true stories about catching them in the past.

Could be the case that there were only a handful of things printed at the whole company in a week, considering how obsolete paper has been getting

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

#197

Post by tablespoon »

If they actually did this, it's nice that they leaked their playbook.

Advice for future leakers:

1. Ask your co-worker to forward you that email (because you "accidentally deleted it"), and diff to your copy, so you know if your employer is cosplaying as the CIA.

2. Retype everything before leaking or leak crappy photos of documents on your screen (or better yet, both).

3. Leak to a journalist and make them promise to only describe or quote the documents you're sharing, and not sure the literal files. A lot of this CIA cosplay won't work without access to the leaked file.

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

#198

Post by williamsmj »

zzleeper wrote: post #35

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…

Yep. The story as Musk tells it, and as goes viral every couple of months, is a lie.

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

#199

Post by lr4444lr »

brookst wrote: post #135
fooqux wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Still. He’d have to have the same normal.dot, make the same space/tab choices, same fonts, etc. And in a large company, how many ~1 page letters get printed? What are the odds that there is only a single match in the entire company? I take this story similar to the binary coded space story: more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter future leakers than true stories about catching them in the past.

Perhaps it wasn't an exact byte match, but close enough to only 1 print job size within a reasonable time frame.

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

#200

Post by Firmwarrior »

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/

My wife wanted a photo printer. At first I told her it was a ridiculously primitive and pointless idea, but I went along with it since I had a bonus burning a hole in my pocket

I have to admit, it turned out to be pretty cool. I hadn't used a printer in years for anything personal, and it turns out you can print professional-looking glossy photos for like 15 cents each between ink and glossy photo paper. Now we have a ton of nice family photos all over the walls, and I printed out a selfie from my WoW character when our guild killed some raid boss together and mixed it in with the other pics

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