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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

#351

Post by kamaal »

watwut wrote: post #311
kamaal wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promises to whom? Any outrageous ambition I set for myself, fail and end up achieving 10x along the way is better than routinely setting mediocre goals and succeeding all the time, but achieving way less than the prior scenario. 'Failing upwards' has been a thing for a while now.

No. Especially no when you are manager or any kind of leader. It is either called lies or irrationality or delusion. I am sick of troubled messy projects that fail precisely because management cant admit to themselves that estimates should be higher. Rational behavior is to reward those who make ambitious but realistic goals. Not those who get support on unrealistic lies. Just because it feels good does not mean it i…

Nobody should sign up for a job they don't want to do.

Either its never too late to opt out of any cause.

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

#352

Post by greglindahl »

masklinn wrote: post #350
SolarNet wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand. Even with code review policies, there is still a short list of people who can push to production without going through code review. Not from a policy standpoint but from a security and access perspective.

> Even with code review policies, there is still a short list of people who can push to production without going through code review. That's completely unnecessary and should not be the case. If you need something pushed quickly, you can get a colleague with review bit and get them to ack for "urgency" reasons after a quick lookover.

I'm glad to see evidence that security theater fantasies are alive and well!

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #131
0x4f3759df wrote: post #33

There's $10B in TSLA short positions, when the numbers get this big its not unthinkable.

> There's $10B in TSLA short positions, when the numbers get this big its not unthinkable Yes, it's unthinkable. If a $10 billion short were to even marginally pay off, regulators would dig deep. Anyone with that kind of cash on hand is savvy enough to know that. Sabotaging a visible company, with lots of stockholders and lenders and bankers standing to benefit from the company's success, to pay off a short is someth…

[deleted]

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

#355

Post by greglindahl »

flyingswift wrote: post #198
acover wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know in Microsoft it would be relatively easy to push destructive code changes. It depends on the product though. I was able to connect to production machines. There was someone running torrents in the past.

From my experience on the O365 team, it would have been difficult to push code without approval because it would have voilated a number of the compliance requirements that area of the business has to meet. But yeah, I suppose there are other areas of the company that might have more relaxed requirements

Wait, so you're saying that your personal experience is that Microsoft has exactly the same flaw that you're complaining about?

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

#356

Post by EnderMB »

cottsak wrote: post #84
flyingswift wrote: post #65

I made this same comment on the other discussion. I find it concerning that one person was able to push malicious code to 'production'. To me, this suggests that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, does not employ basic branch policies. How is is it that these changes could have made it through a code review process and get deployed? If a company like Microsoft or Google announced that a disgruntled…

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…

Occam's Razor applies here.

While you're absolutely right, it is far more likely that someone was able to do this because there is a lack of security in their software engineering practices. This isn't aimed at you, but I think a lot of people are blinded by their support of Elon Musk and Tesla to acknowledge that ultimately he's one man, and Tesla are just a company that makes cars. People and companies are fallable.

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

#357

Post by gadders »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #68

Everyone's reaction to this seems to be "He is crazy / paranoid". He gave very specific examples of things this person did. If you were someone with a large position against Telsa, or a competing manufacturer, or an oil / gas company finally picking things up after a terrible oil price collapse, yeah maybe it makes sense to go mess things up subtly enough that the company slips a little bit closer to bankruptcy? I'm…

I never know what to believe with Elon Musk - designing the hyperloop, selling flamethrowers etc.

However, if you did a find on replace on his email and swapped "Tesla" for "Theranos" you could imagine it being an act of desperation.

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

#359

Post by bitL »

flyingswift wrote: post #58
tlb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a vanilla git configuration, it's as easy as: $ vi centrifuge_rpm_controller.cc $ git commit --author "Bob Goodguy " -a -m "Totally harmless changes" $ git push In a high-stakes environment, it's probably worth signing commits. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work

Are we really saying that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, is not employing basic branch policies? How is it that these changes could have made it through a code review process and deployed to 'production'? What I take away from this is that one malicious actor was able to single handedly deploy malicious code and that there were no processes in place to stop this. That is a far more worrying issu…

Do they even use git? Maybe they run some prehistoric CVS to save costs...

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

#360

Post by antpls »

breakingcups wrote: post #322
ckastner wrote: post #295

> Looking forward to having a great week with you as we charge up the super exciting ramp to 5000 Model 3 cars per week! This was actually the most surprising part to me -- it appears that they believe that they will actually make the 5K/week goal by the end of this quarter. As to the allegations... the email doesn't say much, but it sounds like a disgruntled employee grabbing data to me, and perhaps modifying some O…

Then again, Musk knows that this email will instantly get leaked. This is PR as much as anything.

What if that communication was an attempt at discovering the leak source? Maybe there is an uniquely identifiable token or wording in the original mail(s) (per division, or team). Did any one counted the spaces or looked for invisible Unicode characters?
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