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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

#101

Post by fooqux »

njovin wrote: post #88
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,…

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.

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

#103

Post by _djo_ »

jmeister wrote: post #14
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…

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…

Militaries that rely on volunteers rather than conscription absolutely don't get away with being completely authoritarian and treating regular soldiers terribly. They have to form a social contract of sorts, where people put up with some loss of autonomy in specific areas in return for other benefits like education or training, autonomy in other areas they might value more (like small team leadership), and decent service conditions. No service members tolerate regular and capricious abuse, and leaders found to do that seldom remain in post long. It's not a perfect system of course, but abusive behaviour by leadership is definitely the exception.

Issues around service conditions regularly go all the way to Congress and get resolved quickly and sometimes expensively, because the alternative is being unable to recruit or retain personnel, and that would be disastrous for a military that's already having a tough time doing both.

Let's not justify abusive leadership. There's never a need for it.

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

#104

Post by FartyMcFarter »

eesmith wrote: post #49
djohnston wrote: post #2

I was thinking about this recently, couldn't you alter one word in message to create two copies, and then basically perform binary search until you find the person?

Tom Clancy in the book "Patriot games" (1987), p86 at https://archive.org/details/patriotgamesclan00clan/page/86/m... : > ... first draft of the report, I came up with an idea to make each one unique." > "They've been doing that for years," Holmes noted. "All one must do is misplace a comma here and there. Easiest thing in the world. If the newspeople are foolish enough to print a photograph of the document, we can i…

I believe the novel "The Word" by Irving Wallace (1972) features something similar, if I remember correctly.

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

#105

Post by JustSomeNobody »

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?

Copy paste the text into and console text editor. Should easily see the "hidden" characters, then.

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

#106

Post by praptak »

Some primers about avoiding the basic mistakes when leaking (don't read them from your work laptop obviously. That would be the first mistake!):

https://freedom.press/news/sharing-sensitive-leaks-press/

https://mashable.com/article/leaking-hacking-data-nsa-anonym...

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

#107

Post by HideousKojima »

asdajksah2123 wrote: post #92
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.

Corporate networks tend to keep printer logs for extremely long durations. Also, printers at home are incredibly useful. I'm surprised more people don't have them. Especially now that online shopping (and therefore online returns) are so much more common and require printing return labels.

Amazon returns no longer require printing out labels, so someone who does most/all their online ordering via Amazon wouldn't need a printer.

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

#108

Post by bloak »

greggsy wrote: post #23
staplung wrote: post #12

It’s called whitespace watermarking and seems to be one of those ideas that keeps getting re-invented. It’s used a lot, particularly in HTML where the rendering hides the identifying spaces. It can help you figure out if someone is scrapping your content.

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.

There's also something similar in "The human factor" by Graham Greene, a good spy story.

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

#109

Post by torben-friis »

brk wrote: post #68
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,…

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.

>Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would generally assume that everybody has at least 1 printer at home.

I haven’t seen a home printer since I moved out. In all these years I’ve only needed to use a printer once (sheet music when I was learning piano).

It’s just not that common to use paper anymore, aside from school projects.

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

#110

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

HideousKojima wrote: post #107
asdajksah2123 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate networks tend to keep printer logs for extremely long durations. Also, printers at home are incredibly useful. I'm surprised more people don't have them. Especially now that online shopping (and therefore online returns) are so much more common and require printing return labels.

Amazon returns no longer require printing out labels, so someone who does most/all their online ordering via Amazon wouldn't need a printer.

I need to print return stickers for Amazon in EU.
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