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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

#391

Post by jasec57322 »

htgb wrote: post #369
rapsey wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To produce great work you also need some pressure. Otherwise people will get real lazy very quickly.

Counterpoint: open source software, of which there are many great works without anyone being forced or pressured into making it. There are many more ways of getting motivation than applying "some pressure". Indeed, people are inherently curious and motivated, but it can easily be suppressed by environmental factors. In particular "stick and carrot"-type reward systems. For a (much more) elaborate expansion on this, s…

All this musk-style motivation 101 BS is direct from the CIA's manual on domestic espionage - frustration from within.

The means define the ends. If you treat people like shit, or as morons who need BS pressure techniques, you'll get a demoralised company.

Treat people well, set them clear targets and say it without fluff when they're slacking. If you can't tell somebody they're not good enough, you cannot help them to be good enough. None of this psychobabble BS where you're constantly second-guessing in a failed attempt to retain them on the rat-race for the rest of their life. Stop building ratrace companies.

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

#392

Post by systemvoltage »

rapsey wrote: post #355
lake_vincent wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not actually merged with robots yet, and we still have human needs. If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand, you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking and just give people what they need to produce gre…

To produce great work you also need some pressure. Otherwise people will get real lazy very quickly.

I think motivation is more important. Solving problems should be fun and engaging activity. There are always bad apples literally in every single company no matter how good or faithful their culture. So, there is no way around it.

To give Elon credit, he does try to motivate people. Sleeping on the factory floor, doing more work than his subordinates, inspiring people about grand goals and "anti-bureacratic" philosophy – all contribute to motivation. He sent out an email to Tesla employees that literally said "If a rule becomes a Dilbert joke, then change the rule".

I am trying to steelman Elon's way of governing and personally know several people at SpaceX that are not dying from overwork, but actually happy. I also have a few friends who couldn't stand SpaceX and quit within the first year.

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

#393

Post by simondotau »

mschuster91 wrote: post #277
barelysapient wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

... and here I'm just happy about German employee and EU data protection laws. This kind of abuse would be plainly illegal here and entitle the employee to significant compensation.

What part would be illegal?

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

#394

Post by systemvoltage »

rapsey wrote: post #372
htgb wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: open source software, of which there are many great works without anyone being forced or pressured into making it. There are many more ways of getting motivation than applying "some pressure". Indeed, people are inherently curious and motivated, but it can easily be suppressed by environmental factors. In particular "stick and carrot"-type reward systems. For a (much more) elaborate expansion on this, s…

The vast majority of open source done in peoples free time is unfinished and at best of limited use. The serious projects very often have payed developers. The good ones done by unpaid developers have some pressure in terms of expectations by their community or the developers put pressure on themselves to achieve some self goal.

OSS projects are also prone to leadership issues and tend to have "good ol boys" clubs. It's utlimately human nature, OSS or not. See Linus Torvals or some of the things that went on in Rust community. Also, StackOverflow mods that volunteer their free time have so many issues. Wikipedia editors and Reddit moderators. Same.

Putting a OSS lipstick isn't doing any favors to understanding the human nature and how to create a good governance model to keep people happy. I suspect this is never going to be "solved", only solved in one person's views or ideological bias.

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

#395

Post by bradjohnson »

aksss wrote: post #390
bradjohnson wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your particular example wouldn't be deterred from the tactics that Elon says that he used, though. If it's not leaked to the public it wouldn't be seen by those that encoded an identifier into it.

defense in layers. no single mechanism wins the trophy.

Shaming tactics are orthogonal to defense, especially when the only way this succeeds is when nobody thinks the CEO is paranoid enough to try it. If anyone is leaking private memos from an Elon company now, it is trivial to disrupt this by reformatting the document and rephrasing sentences.

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

#396

Post by bckr »

lake_vincent wrote: post #382
whatwherewhy wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Gates is an asshole, Jobs was an asshole - where's the middleground? Maybe niceness leads to [business] mediocrity.

Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery doesn't mean that slavery is okay, or that there is not a better way to build a pyramid.

The pyramids were not built with slavery

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

#397

Post by bradjohnson »

nickff wrote: post #324
bradjohnson wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your particular example wouldn't be deterred from the tactics that Elon says that he used, though. If it's not leaked to the public it wouldn't be seen by those that encoded an identifier into it.

But it would be discoverable and traceable in the case of legal proceedings.

If they kept the original correspondence then it would anyway. Plus this wouldn't be legally binding in a court room when Elon runs in and is like "I think the spaces match the one that I sent to this employee." That is not enough evidence to say that the employee did it when it is trivial for the ploy to be subverted by another employee just inserting a space in a random place.

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

#398

Post by whatwherewhy »

lake_vincent wrote: post #382
whatwherewhy wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Gates is an asshole, Jobs was an asshole - where's the middleground? Maybe niceness leads to [business] mediocrity.

Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery doesn't mean that slavery is okay, or that there is not a better way to build a pyramid.

Don't be absurd, we are not talking about anything comparable to slavery.

I am asking - show me the person who found the better way.

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

#399

Post by pb7 »

no_carrier wrote: post #264
haasted wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genius used a similar technique to check whether Google was scraping their lyrics. Apostrophes in selected song lyrics spelled out "red-handed" in morse code. https://www.pcmag.com/news/genius-we-caught-google-red-hande...

Interesting... Google caught out Bing stealing search results a number of years before that - https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying... I guess engineers at Google have too short of tenure to actually remember the precedent.

> Google blames the issue on third-party licensing partners. "The lyrics displayed in information boxes on Google Search are licensed from a variety of sources and are not scraped from sites on the web," the company said in a statement.

Did you read the link?

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

#400

Post by kotaKat »

zikduruqe wrote: post #312
simiones wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty well known that map makers do this, adding non-existent small localities to detect when someone is blindly copying their work.

I used to work in a laboratory where we tested pre-production cell phones (this was before the iPhone...). Different OEMs would send us sample devices with different fonts on the keypad, or with little blemishes on the keypad, or would put little subtle cosmetic changes to devices to catch leakers. Funny when you would see devices pop up on the internet with these little things, and wonder who lost their contracts/jo…

Funnily enough -- I came across a prototype Pantech device and I suspect that it's not only disguised for the carrier, but also the design and number of the Os could help trace its origin.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/134172491386

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