291–300 of 448 posts
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ask your work nemesis to forward you the email and just leak that wholesale
This will work right up until they check the mail logs and/or your work nemesis says "oh yeah, I forwarded it to Bob."
If you’re at a company that’s incentivized to do insider threat programs - big tech, finance, govt tech, any sort of serious funding - these tactics are commonplace. If watermarked emails seems over the top, there are almost certainly IT security tools with extensive access running as a process on your machine for this use case too.
With ithreat, there is someone checking who doesn’t care about your reddit use.
But, The 1-2 blend of insider threat programs having the access and wfh productivity suspicions increasing makes me think mgmt will poke under the hood in these logs beyond I-threat concerns at some point soon.
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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 simplest answer is that this didn’t happen and it’s just a myth.
The Musk detective work is described by Vance in a footnote:
“Musk would later discover the identity of this employee in an ingenious way. He copied the text of the letter into a Word document, checked the size of the file, sent it to a printer, and looked over the logs of printer activity to find one of the same size. He could then trace that back to the person who had printed the original file. The employee wrote a letter of apology and resigned.”
This leaves me a with more than a few questions:
1. Why would this email/letter have been printed out? It's short, informal, and did not seem to contain any corporate materials that would require access from a work computer. Surely, this would be better sent as an email from a personal computer? All I can think of is that the employee did print some kind of private company information (perhaps as proof?) to send to Valleywag. But wouldn't this mean that the print-job sizes wouldn't match since there would be printed materials not made public? It seems beyond insane to physically mail a tip to a gossip site that was built around emailed tips.
2. If this was sent as a physical letter, why would the quote in the article contain the typos? Why would they even take the time to type up the entire letter when the article summarizes every single point that the Tesla employee mentioned? Shouldn't they have taken some care to not verbatim reproduce text that could have gotten their source into trouble? I will say that the minimal journalistic standards employed by former Gawker-network sites provide convenient explanations to these questions, so these aren't particularly damning.
3. Is this really all the text that was sent to Valleywag? The quoted part of the letter provides no salutation or signature. Sending this text exactly as quoted as a physical letter seems bizarre, even for an anonymous tip.
4. Would the sizes of the files sent to the printer even match up considering the document metadata? This actually seems somewhat plausible.
5. Would the print-job really be the best way to figure out who the leaker was? In October 2008, before the letter was written, Tesla only had 363 employees[3] and may have laid off a few dozen of them before this letter was written. This employee claims to have joined in 2004. A Wired article from 2006[4] mentions a meeting of 30 Tesla employees and board members in December 2004. It seems like there are a very small number of people who could have been the potentially leaker. How many of those people were using the corporate printers the day after the mentioned all-hands meeting to print a single page document?
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I imagine that this story was told to present Musk as smarter than everyone else while also threatening disloyalty, which seems to be a frequent Musk bugbear. The bit about the caught employee writing a letter of apology and then resigning (amidst large-scale layoffs at Tesla in 2008!) also seems a little too cute, in a chain-email-atheist-professor-humiliated-by-freshman-Albert-Einstein kind of way.
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[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/elon-...
[2] https://www.gawker.com/5071621/tesla-motors-has-9-million-in...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-oct-25-fi-tesla...
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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/
My c64 has a great working dotmatrix printer. A home computer without a printer is a modern invention. I would expect if the employee had a computer they would have a printer.
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> 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?
1) It's been more than once that we've seen hackers completely wipe people's digital lives? I mean, how problematic will logging in to many of these services be if Google decides to lock your account? 2) As an American example, ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another. Simply put trying to figure out other peoples security and sensitivity sensibilities is not something y…
There are still much more convenient and technically superior methods than using physical paper copies if that is your concern.
> ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another.
Using "unscrupulous, if not criminal, activity" as an example in this instance doesn't seem like the best argument.
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It changes with age. Men in their teens/twenties are followers, by your mid-thirties you start to question things.
Pretty sure that the rebellion starts in the teens, source: myself, all my friends and now my friends children.
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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simplest answer is that this didn’t happen and it’s just a myth.
I agree; this story is apocryphal. I was annoyed enough that I did some research into the story. Via this Atlantic article[1], I found the original Valleywag post[2] containing the letter from the employee. It's worth noting that the letter from the employee is pure text (i.e. not a scan of a letter), is only 170 words long, and has a couple of misspellings. The Valleywag post provides a paraphrasing of what the empl…
https://web.archive.org/web/20221116003941/https://www.wired...
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.