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Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

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Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#161

Post by apoorvkumar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #123
colordrops wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got to be kidding right? One could easily create a list of 1000s of instances of corruption and corporate warfare in the US. And in China it's worse by a couple orders of magnitude, and more visible. Millions of people have been murdered over money let alone sabotaging a company. Lets not call others paranoid when it's actually naivety of these problems that is the issue.

> One could easily create a list of 1000s of instances of corruption and corporate warfare in the US Help me out.

It's not a difficult thing to look up.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/24/politics/fbi-economic-espiona...

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#162

Post by closeparen »

EGreg wrote: post #125
cottsak wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very naive comment. There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. Ideally, with mature controls, the people in this list is short. But to jump to the conclusion that Tesla doesn't use good practises is very short sighted. Who's to say that external parties didn't target this person specifically because of their role/influe…

Why is it naive to expect there not to be a single point of failure like that? Code reviews are a thing.

Code review is a policy. If there's automated enforcement, it's through software written by someone, configured by someone, on a server that someone has root access to, in a room that someone has physical access to. If you have code signing, someone set up and patches the code signing server. Someone configures the code signing enforcement plane on the target devices. Someone gets to provision new accounts and enroll new keys.

Code reviews are a thing, but physical/mathematical assurance that zero people in your organization can bypass them are not. However amazing your tower of automation and policy may be, there's at least one sysadmin underneath it all, and at least one guy with keys to the cabinet underneath him. That only starts to diverge when you're running on FIPS 140-2 Level 3+ HSMs and you need to assemble a quorum of operators to do anything. And those are quite easy to sabotage - just trip the tamper protection mechanisms.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#163

Post by jwatte »

robotresearcher wrote: post #106
internetman55 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i thought we already solved that; it's called journalism just read the economist or NYT or whatever you like and stfu instead of thinking you're going to somehow to a better job gathering and exploring information than that

I'd like to do that. But every time there is a story about something I really do know about, it is so wrong as to be highly misleading.

That's not new. Journalists aren't experts in any profession, that's always been the case.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#164

Post by mikeytown2 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #160
colechristensen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't strike me as paranoia. Thinking that industrial espionage doesn't happen seems naive. What they have is an admitted saboteur and code that exports data to third parties. It quacks like a duck. A disgruntled employee succumbed to or sought out people who wished to do harm to Tesla. There's plenty of evidence of similar things happening. (edit to fix words) If you work in the defense industry you get things…

Great comment, but I’m not sure what events you’re referring to when you say: > American companies have overthrown governments to benefit their business Care to elaborate?

Iran in the 1950s

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#165

Post by nixpulvis »

jethro_tell wrote: post #128
taneq wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there's paranoia going around, I wonder whether whoever leaked that email first checked it for hidden Unicode fingerprinting... :P

And that's why you always send plain text email.

Might be unclear, plaintext is usually Unicode these days.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#166

Post by nixpulvis »

Jedd wrote: post #77
ucaetano wrote: post #34

We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don't love the idea of T…

> Wow, the level of paranoia he's going into is impressive. Whereas my reading suggested a moderate and cautious response was being exercised. There is a lot of wealth resting on this and similar projects not succeeding. > And amazing how close his speech is moving (in form) to Trump's: it is all about "rumors", "alleged", "witch hunt", "unfair" 'all about' ? I'm not seeing the similarities at all. He used the word r…

Not to mention Trump would NEVER say:

> Most of the time, when there is theft of goods, leaking of confidential information, dereliction of duty or outright sabotage, the reason really is something simple like wanting to get back at someone within the company or at the company as a whole.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#167

Post by venning »

madaxe_again wrote: post #141
smadge wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide examples of explicit corporate sabotage (e.g. criminally stopping production in a factory) being lightly punished by the SEC?

No, because corporate sabotage is outside of their remit. They would only look at it within the realms of market manipulation and insider trading, for which the punishment is a) usually light and b) usually deflected onto a fall guy. In terms of the actual espionage end of things, it’s covered by EEA 1996 - and the prosecutions there have always gone for the hand, not the head, and the fines have been in the thousand…

You started by questioning jail time, then brought in the SEC. Now you're stating the SEC doesn't deal with industrial sabotage and talking about fines, which no one else mentioned.

As for actual jail time, here [1] is a single engineer in California (same jurisdiction as Tesla, presumably) that was sentenced to 15 years. Also, $28 million in fines, which is what he earned for his espionage. Another engineer got 2.5 years for the same incident [2]. And this was the very first instance of people being convicted under the Economic Espionage Act you mentioned. Further reading: [3].

I don't think the facts support your position.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-espionage-sentence-dup...

[2] https://www.law360.com/articles/571212/ex-dupont-engineer-ge...

[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-individuals-and-company-f...

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#168

Post by dboreham »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #160
colechristensen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't strike me as paranoia. Thinking that industrial espionage doesn't happen seems naive. What they have is an admitted saboteur and code that exports data to third parties. It quacks like a duck. A disgruntled employee succumbed to or sought out people who wished to do harm to Tesla. There's plenty of evidence of similar things happening. (edit to fix words) If you work in the defense industry you get things…

Great comment, but I’m not sure what events you’re referring to when you say: > American companies have overthrown governments to benefit their business Care to elaborate?

Not the parent but this example comes to mind : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

(A British multinational company, but US did the overthrowing)

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#169

Post by TomVDB »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #160
colechristensen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't strike me as paranoia. Thinking that industrial espionage doesn't happen seems naive. What they have is an admitted saboteur and code that exports data to third parties. It quacks like a duck. A disgruntled employee succumbed to or sought out people who wished to do harm to Tesla. There's plenty of evidence of similar things happening. (edit to fix words) If you work in the defense industry you get things…

Great comment, but I’m not sure what events you’re referring to when you say: > American companies have overthrown governments to benefit their business Care to elaborate?

My immediate reaction would be the United Fruit Company and it’s dealings in South America.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

But I’m sure you can find instances where oil companies heavily influence politics in governments all over the world.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#170

Post by nope96 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #160
colechristensen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't strike me as paranoia. Thinking that industrial espionage doesn't happen seems naive. What they have is an admitted saboteur and code that exports data to third parties. It quacks like a duck. A disgruntled employee succumbed to or sought out people who wished to do harm to Tesla. There's plenty of evidence of similar things happening. (edit to fix words) If you work in the defense industry you get things…

Great comment, but I’m not sure what events you’re referring to when you say: > American companies have overthrown governments to benefit their business Care to elaborate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Chiquita_Brands_Interna...
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