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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

#151

Post by jwozn »

bojan wrote: post #86
prepend wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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 had an old HP printer from 2009 that I finally got rid of this year. The case was broken, the tray was falling off, and it spent years collecting dust. It still worked! Only the ink dried out. I'm curious about the reliability of printers, and how often people have to replace them.

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

#152

Post by ranting-moth »

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,…

Yet another reason to lock your screen when you stand up. The guy could have printed it from someone else's computer.

It seems incredibly naive to print out a leak letter from work.

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

#153

Post by FartyMcFarter »

eesmith wrote: post #142
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nice, thank you! I tried to CTRL-F it myself there and hadn't managed.

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

#154

Post by Workaccount2 »

moron4hire wrote: post #115
fooqux wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I would assume there was also at least a minor degree of due diligence, such as "Would this person actually have had the knowledge to write letter".

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

#155

Post by registeredcorn »

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…

>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore

No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends.

My company is hardly some "golden child", but it generally does right by its staff, and the staff, more or less, does right by the company. Things aren't perfect, but I would say the amount of inter-office trust is about as close as anyone would reasonably expect. Problems pop up, but with a healthy amount of addressing things head on, those problems don't rot and fester.

Need someone to be honest with you about the deadline of an upcoming project? Done.

Need to get a hold of someone off-hours on a three day weekend? Alright, as long as it's something important and time sensitive.

Need realistic feedback about a presentation you're working on. Sure.

It all revolves around mutual respect, camaraderie, and clearly defined roles. When I see an upcoming issue with an area I have nothing to do with, I don't feel the need to fix it "because no one else will", but, I also don't leave it to blow up in someone else's face either. I let the right people know, or tell my boss if I'm not sure who should be involved.

If I had to take a guess, maybe you work for one of those larger corporate type companies with lots of middle managers, office politics, etc.? I'd encourage you to look at getting away from that if it's weighing heavily on your ability to trust others. It's something that I dealt with for a length of time, and once I moved onto a smaller shop, the ability to trust and genuinely rely on others improved quite a bit.

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

#156

Post by iceburgcrm »

prepend wrote: post #73
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.

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.

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

#158

Post by grishka »

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.

Good HTML parser libraries follow that part of the spec and collapse multiple spaces into one.

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

#159

Post by flanbiscuit »

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,…

Let's say a person was aware that tracing in this manner was possible but they still needed to use the office printer. What if they wrote a letter and also added pages of other additional paragraphs. They print all those pages but only mail the one page and shred the rest. This would show a much bigger file kb-wise in the printer log and would not get caught.

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

#160

Post by crazygringo »

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?

The only really foolproof way is to convert the text to a bitmap and then OCR it, to ensure you aren't trapped by lookalike glpyhs or varying spaces. (OCR will generally make all spaces single, since spacing varies so widely in practice due to things like justification. It also usually makes all quotes straight since the per-font variation makes it too hard to distinguish open/close quotes.)

You can do this easily enough on MacOS simply by taking a screenshot, pasting it into Preview, selecting the text with its automatic OCR, and copying.

Of course you still need to worry about whether line lengths are varied per-recipient, or even the wording of the e-mail itself. But the above will at least take care of glyphs.

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