just take a screenshot with a camera on the content [0], duh.
Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
251–260 of 448 posts
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#252Ashlee 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.
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Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#253Ashlee 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,…
To be really secure when leaking typed documents, I get 5 colleagues together and we whisper the leak along the line, so that many of the words are changed by the end. For each word we are randomly spaced to defeat Musk's space-based detection. We then take the output of this and transcribe it over an old HAM radio to a friend in China. He lives on a farm, so he then dictates it to a chicken who writes it in the sand…
Are you not worried the chicken is a Musk informant? Shouldn't you be using a range of animals who each only have access to part of the message?
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#254Earlier 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.
If he had access to printer logs, he would know exactly what everyone printed and when they did it.
Networked printers store a lot of information about what is being printed.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#255Ashlee 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,…
There's no way someone as stupid as him thought of that.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#256Ashlee 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.
OP says he compared them in terms of KBs, if this is taken literally then he didn't check to see if they were exactly the same length. Assuming that the two word documents are actually identical except for metadata, I wouldn't expect the size discrepancy to be on the order of kilobytes.
Still a reckless way to identify the leaker, there's plenty of reasonable doubt if all they have to go on is the size of the document that was printed.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#257Distributing unique, but similar documents is a pretty standard method of document control/leak detection. It was certainly not invented by Musk or anyone at Tesla.
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
I typically also only print 2-3 times a year as well. But those times are sensitive-ish documents (one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet, even though it’s submitted electronically) and I don’t want them printed on a printer I don’t own (paranoia). (And my printer is not connected to the network, I connect via USB).
> one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet ...what year is this? Like, I have some questions: 1) Why keep hard copies of documents created electronically when there are so many more redundant, more secure, and more convenient ways keep the electronic versions themselves? 2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?
> 2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?
Well, it includes social-security numbers for starters, and may also include bank account routing information (where to send the refund check, or withdraw in case of extra payment needed).
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#259Why 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…
Do you know what it's like in military organizations around the world and in history? Most men don't have a problem with authoritarian hierarchies as long as the hierarchy is justified in their view. Tech people are extremely coddled and clueless about how the rest of the world works and the moral intuitions of normal people. "The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither…
We're _aware_ of that, but the past forty or so years of software development have been extremely anti-hierarchical - or the "hierarchy of one" / "benevolent dictator for life" flat structure.
Hierarchy has its own failure modes. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred ..
Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
#260Ashlee 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.
This was my first thought as well. Is the file size really that precisely deterministic from a mammoth program like Word given different dates, machines, versions, etc?
Given that Musk is not the most reliable narrator, to say the least, I'm skeptical of this story. I'm sure he sees plenty of utility in appearing omniscient to frighten potential leakers.