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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,…
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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.
Always found it ironic that their own products (gmail/chrome) gave away their attempts at steganography.
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,…
It's also the CEO of the company taking time from the shareholders to hunt down and hurt someone.
Don't work for people like this.
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 "…
I just took it for granted, but that environment was a bit of a "silo." When I left that company, and started to interact with today's tech culture, it was ... quite a letdown.
It seems that most executives are fairly sketchy people, these days, and they set a culture that is mimicked by the folks that work for them.
I guess that it's always been like that, but it seems a lot worse, these days.
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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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It's pretty well known that map makers do this, adding non-existent small localities to detect when someone is blindly copying their work.
i wonder how many people have died or had life changing experiences, because they thought there would be a village, but found only rocks and bushes there.
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Musk has significant fingers in OpenAI: if you use the API to do this, I wonder if he'd find you in the logs?
Bold of you to assume people will use OpenAI for this. They fortunately no longer have a monopoly on useful AI.
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 t…