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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

#221

Post by BurningFrog »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #131
prepend wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with someone who would tell me very precise weird personal details (eg, “the left side of my mouth can’t taste”). I found it odd because they weren’t really pertinent and seemed really unique that I’ve never heard of anyone else with the condition. I suspected he did this to try to determine who they can trust when he would remark that people were liars or not trustworthy and one time a coworker told me a co…

That sounds like a terrible workplace in general.

True.

But also very interesting!

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

#222

Post by myself248 »

gmjosack wrote: post #213

~10 years ago I discovered Google doing steganography and their e-mails by accident. I was searching gmail for an e-mail message using a word I knew was definitely in the message but it was not being found. Eventually I found the e-mail and confirmed the word was definitely there. Ctrl+F and type the word, it's not found. Turned out there were random Cyrillic characters mixed through the message. Confirmed with other…

> discovered Google doing steganography and their e-mails by accident

discovered by accident that Google was doing steganography in their e-mails

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

#223

Post by VectorLock »

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.

More important is spreading the perception he was able to sleuth down who the leaker was, to deter future leakers.

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

#225

Post by marcusverus »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #154
moron4hire wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It'd be even easier than that. Walk to the person's desk and ask them to bring up the document that they printed on ${printer} at ${time}. If he can't produce a document of the correct size, he's your guy.

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

#226

Post by myself248 »

virtualritz wrote: post #10
croes wrote: post #7

What if someone spottet some space characters and deleted them? I do if I see double spaces. Or is it about printed documents?

There are thin spaces, hair spaces etc. in unicode. Multiple of those will just look like a normal space. Only if you tried to select them one by one would you become aware. But that's not what people usually do when they C&P a block of text That said: not sure how they will look in a text-only (no WYSIWYG) editor or a mail client set to display raw text.

Or just paste into Notepad first and then copy from there to the destination. I find myself doing that as a quick-and-easy way to strip formatting, but it also knocks out a lot of weird characters.

The luxuries of living in iso-latin-1, I suppose.

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

#227

Post by throwntoday »

Someone wrote: post #111
njovin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The OP talks about the size in kilobytes, not bytes. That will almost certainly give false positives, but if you limit the time range, it may not be that bad. Not a bad idea for initial filtering, I think, but I doubt it would hold up in court on itself.

I think you're forgetting that he could just re-print the file once he had located which printer it was on to verify. Once verified it's the file in question, you could easily check which device sent it to the printer.

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

#228

Post by Firmwarrior »

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…

Man, that sounds pretty sweet

3 months of severance, after a good 6+ month run of lame duck employment where the whole company didn't really do anything. I could take my time and buy a nice house out in the Midwest, then pick up an easy remote job for $100-150k

I guess it's a different story if you dumped your life savings into a down payment and now you have to keep up with an $8000 Bay Area mortgage though

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

#229

Post by avgcorrection »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #66
biztos wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t the “leakee” then be able to say you just made it up?

Yes. But they'll say that anyway, even if you publish the document in full. This is why a trusted free press matters, and why authoritarians work so hard to undermine it.

A trusted and free press huh. In what works of fiction can I read about those?
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