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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

#231

Post by schemescape »

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.

The simplest answer is that this didn’t happen and it’s just a myth.

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

#232

Post by robomartin »

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…

> So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage.

Espionage isn't a fantasy, it's very much real. People go to jail for it all the time. The only question is to what degree might a company be affected or targeted. Taking steps to add a reasonable layer of security to attempt to protect costly IP isn't being paranoid at all. Not to mention that in some environments there are legal requirements, a prime example being aerospace.

We have had the experience of having an employee provide confidential technical information to a multi-billion dollar international competitor. The same competitor that, for as long as a year, bribed top resellers not to feature our products at industry trade shows. Business can be absolutely brutal and, yes, it can be war.

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

#233

Post by datadata »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #161
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.

I can imagine that a company actually saves everything being printed for security / auditing reasons, along with who issued the print request, etc.

I think such a company would equally want to not retain such records (at least not indefinitely), for fear of discovery in legal processes, etc.

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

#234

Post by mzs »

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…

Some are probably trapped by their visa.

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

#235

Post by memish »

giantrobot wrote: post #203
memish wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

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

#236

Post by dmix »

blarghyblarg wrote: post #143
savanaly wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a fun project any hacker would get distracted by.

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

#237

Post by dmix »

datadata wrote: post #233
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine that a company actually saves everything being printed for security / auditing reasons, along with who issued the print request, etc.

I think such a company would equally want to not retain such records (at least not indefinitely), for fear of discovery in legal processes, etc.

Or most likely laziness.

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

#238

Post by barelysapient »

lr4444lr wrote: post #199
brookst wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still. He’d have to have the same normal.dot, make the same space/tab choices, same fonts, etc. And in a large company, how many ~1 page letters get printed? What are the odds that there is only a single match in the entire company? I take this story similar to the binary coded space story: more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter future leakers than true stories about catching them in the past.

Perhaps it wasn't an exact byte match, but close enough to only 1 print job size within a reasonable time frame.

Exactly this. If you know that its around 36kb, and had to be printed between two dates, the list narrows substantially. And more than likely, the printer queue or corporate compliance tools had additional functionality that made such a search trivial.

I have my own story about this: In the early 2010's I had a boss that loved to call us and check in every day. We were a remote team and he had anxiety that we were all larking off. I later learned his technique was to open the dropbox admin tools to see the location of someone before calling them. "So, BarelySapient, where are you working at today?", he'd ask in a cheerful tone. But in reality, he was testing employee truthfulness. Every call. He later fired one of my co-workers when they reported to be working from home, but dropbox reported them somewhere in the Florida keys....

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

#239

Post by rideontime »

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,…

Absolutely fake. The tell is that Musk himself did all the sleuthing.

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

#240

Post by 411111111111111 »

schemescape wrote: post #231
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 simplest answer is that this didn’t happen and it’s just a myth.

Honestly speaking, the story sounds somewhat believable to me.

They likely misidentified the leaker with that silly analysis and fired them on the spot, would be just the usual modus operandi of musk.

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