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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

#91

Post by tslathrowaway31 »

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…

There were no malicious code changes, rather malicious and deliberate misconfiguration of the software.

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

#92

Post by kbenson »

Jedd wrote: post #80
jcranmer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the standpoint of anyone trying to sabotage Tesla, the risk/reward ratio is extremely high. To claim that someone is trying to do so is an extraordinary claim, and we all know the saying about extraordinary claims...

> From the standpoint of anyone trying to sabotage Tesla, the risk/reward ratio is extremely high. Can you show your working in that calculation please? My understanding is that the reward / risk ratio is extremely high for more than a handful of obvious players.

That was my initial reaction to that assessment as well. Normally the risk-reward ratio is high, but with the largest short position of the market (at some point inthe last couple months, possibly still currently) at above $10 billion, that's a lot of potential reward that might be capable of being paid out, even when we consider that much of it is small individual positions.

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

#93

Post by tslathrowaway31 »

minimaxir wrote: post #4

> This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties. How do "false usernames" work in a modern development environment where all commits are tied to a single real-world user?

I've already said this, but there were no malicious code changes, rather malicious and deliberate misconfiguration of the software.

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

#94

Post by jcranmer »

nodesocket wrote: post #10
yasp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that anyone cares or asked what I think but I wouldn't be surprised if Elon ends up surpassing Crazie Eddie Antar [0] as far as fraud goes. (I have no idea whether he is a fraud. He just strikes me as likely a fraud.) [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Eddie

I see a lot of resentment and "hate" on HN about Elon and quite honestly I don't understand where it is coming from. Where are the facts that Elon/Tesla is one gigantic fraud? Where is the scientific proof?

For me, personally, I strongly dislike the Hyperloop and Loop proposals. I can provide lots of details about why these systems suck as public transit options (and I've done so in the past several times), but there has tended to be an annoying cohort that rejects any and all criticism, no matter how reasoned it is. While I don't particularly pay attention to Tesla and Space X, I've noticed that there is similarly a very vocal cohort that responds to criticism by attacking detractors as shills for short sellers/Big Oil/Big Auto/Big Space, which certainly fuels schadenfreude for me and make me want to root against Tesla just to see that vocal cohort shut up.

It should also be pointed out that there was recently a very public revelation about a Silicon Valley startup that made big noise about disrupting a stagnant industry whose technology was accused as being impossible which turned out to be a massive fraud. Tesla is a company which has certainly failed to meet many of its projected milestones, and whose public stature is partially based on a major technology which has failed to deliver so far (Autopilot). Undoubtedly, many people are liable to find the comparison too similar for comfort.

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

#95

Post by rplst8 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #53
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…

Fifteen years ago Echelon, NSA's email surveillance program, was considered a wild conspiracy on par with chemtrails. I think this kind of 'paranoia' is absolutely justified in today's world.

Yeah, as far as I'm concerned, the argument "you sound like a conspiracy theorist" doesn't hold water any more.

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

#96

Post by acover »

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…

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.

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

#97

Post by durkie »

Fricken wrote: post #66
abc_lisper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News flash! Achieving great things is hard and everybody makes some mistakes along the way. On the way, they meet jokers who take great pride in laughing at their mistakes, because, let's be real, jokers are sore losers. Deep down they know they can't do 1% of that shit, and so yeah, let's lift a leg and piss on that fucker. That will show him!

A few mistakes along the way? He's fucking delusional, and mostly works hard taking credit for the work of other people, and for other people's money (you don't get to be a billionaire any other way). He peddles a greenwashed variant of your run of the mill rocket age fantasy that engineering types get all teary eyed about. And hey, If you like accusing people of obeying Godwin's law, now's your big chance, because I…

I think you should reconsider your thoughts about this a bit. There is a genuine revolution underway being enabled by plummeting costs of producing lithium-ion batteries at scale.

Whether or not Tesla will lead it (or even continue be part of it) is certainly up for debate, but large, real things are happening and saying "everyone ride a bike!" is ignoring a reality that isn't tainted by feelings about Tesla/Elon.

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

#98

Post by duxup »

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…

He might sound Trumpish, he might be paranoid, but it does sound like he has something more concrete in terms of an actual event that triggered this email than typical Trumpism.

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

#99

Post by thisisit »

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.

Exactly. It is surprising people pointing out - "Well, so many shorts etc so it's plausible". This kind of reasoning misses the bigger point - we need our leaders, political and otherwise, to refrain from actively pumping out conspiracy theories. If there is proof of malicious behavior present it instead of rumor mongering.

But given Musk's(Tesla) constant need to shift blame - car crash, negative news (Pravado), deflecting questions on financial situation of Tesla and now this, it is not looking good for Tesla.

I hope that next time there is a problem Musk stops at "we are investigating if this is a sabotage" instead of fueling the "it's Wall Street shorts" conspiracy.

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

#100

Post by sanderjd »

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…

> 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.

There is really no reason for this to be the case. Certainly all code that actually runs on the car can be required to go through review and be verifiably built, even if server code standards are more lax.

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