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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

#141

Post by koonsolo »

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,…

I thought printers had a unique fingerprint that's embedded in every document they print?

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

#142

Post by eesmith »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #104
eesmith wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Found it! https://archive.org/details/word0000wall/page/336/mode/2up

> "... Say we send this memo to the same people who received the other memo — well, we don’t have to include anyone in this room — you’re in on it — but we’ll send copies to every one of the others. Each copy of the new memo would be exactly the same, except for one word. In each memo there would be one word not in the others. We would keep a record of the person to whom we sent the memo — and beside his name we would jot the unique word that was in his memo. Do you see what I’m driving at? When the memo goes out, the person here who is betraying us will pass it on word for word to de Vroome, isn’t that so? Your informer in de Vroome’s headquarters would learn of it and report back to you. Since no memorandum would be precisely the same as the others, because of the single word change, you’d look for the different word in the memo de Vroome received and be able to find out the person who had passed on his copy of the memo. You'd know your traitor."

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

#143

Post by blarghyblarg »

savanaly wrote: post #134
moron4hire wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also possible he's just a lunatic who fired an innocent person.

What are the odds that he calculated a certain number of bytes, and exactly one other employee had sent a file to the printer that contained that number, but it was just a coincidence? If the method indeed doesn't work (as you suggest "is possible") it's impossible it would turn up a false positive, only a false negative.

almost as good as the odds that he got something pretty close, then changed the details a bit to fit the narrative.

or, he stayed up for two days until he got it exactly to match by tweaking his approach a little at a time, and actually matched it to the right person. Honestly, he seems like he'd do this.

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

#144

Post by stavros »

savanaly wrote: post #134
moron4hire wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also possible he's just a lunatic who fired an innocent person.

What are the odds that he calculated a certain number of bytes, and exactly one other employee had sent a file to the printer that contained that number, but it was just a coincidence? If the method indeed doesn't work (as you suggest "is possible") it's impossible it would turn up a false positive, only a false negative.

You wouldn't do that though, would you? You'd type the thing up, print it, see that the printer received a 4.7 KB (or whatever) doc and look for a 4-6 KB doc the week of the leak, and then you have 100 documents to go through, rather than 100000.

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

#145

Post by jnsie »

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.

had the exact same thought. if anyone works in-office and has the time/capacity (don't get fired) to do this with some colleagues, it'd be a fun and interesting experiment!

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

#146

Post by capitol_ »

savanaly wrote: post #134
moron4hire wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also possible he's just a lunatic who fired an innocent person.

What are the odds that he calculated a certain number of bytes, and exactly one other employee had sent a file to the printer that contained that number, but it was just a coincidence? If the method indeed doesn't work (as you suggest "is possible") it's impossible it would turn up a false positive, only a false negative.

It's also possible that he calculated the number of bytes, searched the logs, didn't find anything and then tweaked his numbers until something matched. And then fired that random person to make a statement and lied about how he found out who to fire.

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

#147

Post by ranting-moth »

koonsolo wrote: post #141
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,…

I thought printers had a unique fingerprint that's embedded in every document they print?

Laser printers do yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

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

#148

Post by jaywalk »

rtkwe wrote: post #118
bojan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many of those printers are actually still functioning. There was a time once where you actually had to print stuff (anyone remembers MapQuest maps?), so I'm guessing there are still a lot of printers from that era collecting dust at people's homes.

I swapped over to a laser printer for that exact reason. There's still a few things a year I need to print and the laser printer stays working through the lulls where I always had issues with inkjets clogging up.

Yes, I love my laser printer. It's somewhere around 10 years old, and has printed a grand total of 99 pages. But it's still happily using the same toner it came with, while an inkjet's ink would have dried out and needed replacing countless times.

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

#149

Post by memish »

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…

"Click here to agree to an ambitious workplace".

Like SpaceX, only the motivated will agree. That's a requirement for turning Twitter into a SpaceX or Tesla scale success.

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

#150

Post by moffkalast »

wmwmwm wrote: post #34
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

I love this story about Agloe, New York - a "copyright trap" that materialised into a real place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York When another map maker put the actual settlement on their maps, the original publishers cried foul, but then discovered Agloe had become real!

> Agloe is a fictional hamlet

Very fitting, if people weren't sure if it 'be or not be'.

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