Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 448 posts

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

#331

Post by mattferderer »

jmbwell wrote: post #116

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…

Curious if anyone realized this early & either:

* tried to sabotage other employees at random by modifying their letter & leaking it

* tried to sabotage a specific employee by getting their unique copy & leaking it

The risk/reward for a company here seems very poor. I would imagine this blows up in the face of the company often.

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

#332

Post by diebeforei485 »

jmbwell wrote: post #116

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…

> They were so giddy about it.

This makes no sense. Why would they tell everyone what their measures were?

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

#333

Post by timbo1642 »

jmbwell wrote: post #116

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#334

Post by oxfordmale »

jmbwell wrote: post #116

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…

Stick the email into Google Translate, translate to Spanish and back, correcting any major mis-translations and Juan is your uncle .

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

#335

Post by whatwherewhy »

leereeves wrote: post #263
411111111111111 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly speaking, the story sounds somewhat believable to me. They likely misidentified the leaker with that silly analysis and fired them on the spot, would be just the usual modus operandi of musk.

How likely is it that there would just happen to be a file with exactly the same wrong size in the printer logs?

Maybe there was few % error but no other candidate.

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

#336

Post by dbatten »

lagrange77 wrote: post #11

Reminds me of the strategy of map companies, that planted tiny errors or fictional streets in their maps, so that they can identify other map companies, that copied their work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

Google still does this! They seem to use some sort of generative neural net to produce fake names, descriptions, and even reviews for the trap locations.

You can report the location to Google as "bad data" and they'll delete it, but then a totally different fake location will re-appear in its place a few days later.

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

#337

Post by dekhn »

dang wrote: post #319
dekhn wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, e.g. snark, putdowns, and swipes? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you not to, repeatedly. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You haven't asked me repeatedly to stop doing this. It's the first time. I see far worse crap from other users all the time. It kind of looks like you're protecting paulg and elon from criticism.

You did shut my account down previously but it was determined you were mistaken.

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

#338

Post by lake_vincent »

jmbwell wrote: post #116

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…

Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not actually merged with robots yet, and we still have human needs.

If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand, you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking and just give people what they need to produce great work.

You get slightly slower growth, but more area under the curve in the long run.

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

#339

Post by rnk »

Microsoft used to do this. I worked in a startup with an exec a few years later and he admitted they did it. I think everyone does this. We had 10s of thousands of employees at Microsoft, and they'd send out these updates on windows status, like "the beta of the next release is coming in early January with these features". He said they could only vary it a little bit - I think it was spaces, maybe some dots, so an email to a large group would only have enough uniqueness to narrow it down to say 100 people. This must have been an old idea. I couldn't believe those reporters were naive enough to give up Reality Winner's original printout.

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

#340

Post by [deleted] »

xdavidliu wrote: post #62
greggsy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Jobs story sounds quite similar to what Tyrion Lannister did to identify leaks in Game of Thrones. https://youtu.be/Di8Z7rJ9vnI

[deleted]
Post reply on HN