20 ms·

Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

• KETpXDDzR 4y ago
  What most (management) people don't get: The IP are the people, not the code. Nobody wants to read and understand a large code base and there are mostly no secret, revolutionary algorithms in it. However, the developers that wrote that stuff can easily rebuild everything and most probably a better, improved version of it. Companies: Protect your developers, not your code!
• pnikosis 4y ago
  Funny I've never posted anything very interesting here in Hacker News, but a Tweet of mine made the frontpage.
• djohnston 4y ago
  I was thinking about this recently, couldn't you alter one word in message to create two copies, and then basically perform binary search until you find the person?
  • SeanAnderson 4y ago
    Yes
  • willis936 4y ago
    I believe Tyrion did this trick to find out who he could trust while he was serving as Hand of the King.
    • m2fkxy 4y ago
      It's called a barium meal test, or canary trap.
  • _wolfie_ 4y ago
    Yep. It was used in EVE: Online multiple times :)
    • mirages 4y ago
      Or hiding user ID in either the background of the forum playing on the alpha channel or using a special formula to hide the ID inside displayed users scores to identify who is leaking forum's info to other alliances. (back when forums were still a thing)
  • eesmith 4y ago
    Tom Clancy in the book "Patriot games" (1987), p86 at https://archive.org/details/patriotgamesclan00clan/page/86/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/patriotgamesclan00clan/page/86/m... : > ... first draft of the report, I came up with an idea to make each one unique." > "They've been doing that for years," Holmes noted. "All one must do is misplace a comma here and there. Easiest thing in the world. If the newspeople are foolish enough to print a photograph of the document, we can identify the leak." > "Yes, sir, and the reporters who publish the leaks know that, too. They've learned not to show photographs of the documents they get from their sources, haven't they?" Ryan answered. "What I came up with was a new twist on that. Agents and Agencies has four sections. Each section has a summary paragraph. Each of those is written in a fairly dramatic fashion." > "Yes, I noticed that," Charleston said. "Didn't read like a CIA document at all. More like one of ours. We use people to write our reports, you see, not computers. Do go on." > "Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The reason the summary paragraphs are so -- well, lurid, I guess -- is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it. They've got an even more refined version of the trap working now. You can do it by computer. You use a thesaurus program to shuffle through synonyms, and you can make every copy of the document totally unique."
    • FartyMcFarter 4y ago
      I believe the novel "The Word" by Irving Wallace (1972) features something similar, if I remember correctly.
      • eesmith 4y ago
        Found it! https://archive.org/details/word0000wall/page/336/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/word0000wall/page/336/mode/2up > "... Say we send this memo to the same people who received the other memo — well, we don’t have to include anyone in this room — you’re in on it — but we’ll send copies to every one of the others. Each copy of the new memo would be exactly the same, except for one word. In each memo there would be one word not in the others. We would keep a record of the person to whom we sent the memo — and beside his name we would jot the unique word that was in his memo. Do you see what I’m driving at? When the memo goes out, the person here who is betraying us will pass it on word for word to de Vroome, isn’t that so? Your informer in de Vroome’s headquarters would learn of it and report back to you. Since no memorandum would be precisely the same as the others, because of the single word change, you’d look for the different word in the memo de Vroome received and be able to find out the person who had passed on his copy of the memo. You'd know your traitor."
• croes 4y ago
  What if someone spottet some space characters and deleted them? I do if I see double spaces. Or is it about printed documents?
  • virtualritz 4y ago
    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.
    • myself248 4y ago
      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.
    • upofadown 4y ago
      Just checked and emacs running in a terminal displays the different sorts of spaces in unicode as a single space with an underline. I think that a goal for any sort of a text editor intended for programming should be to mark possibly problematic text somehow. Mutt just shows them all as spaces...
• goalieca 4y ago
  Clever but easy to work around now that everyone knows the trick.
  • techdragon 4y ago
    Even easier now major operating systems can just OCR a screenshot. Instant clip a text block and by bye white space… so long tracking spaces, good riddance.
    • Sakos 4y ago
      Until major operating systems start automatically watermarking the results ...
  • illys 4y ago
    "... everyone knows the trick"... Everyone who read the tweet or commented here at this current point in time. Not sure most people who might be future leakers of classified stuff and targetted by this trick will be aware of it.
    • abirch 4y ago
      Someone working at the NSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner didn't realize that each printout had a unique signature printed on it. In general be paranoid but don't expect everyone to be careful.
  • jp42 4y ago
    I'm sure there must be advance techniques to catch leakers...spaces and characters is quite old, though it still works if one is not careful.
• hirundo 4y ago
  Now that this is known they'll need an approach that can survive retyping, like word choice and order. That can be defeated by rephrasing but requires even more work, and is somewhat identifying of the rephraser. If you find a corporate document with a lot of weird sounding word choices and ordering ... it's probably just written by someone not great with the language.
  • unsupp0rted 4y ago
    This would be a good use of GPT-3: take a leaked document and rephrase it so that the original is not identifiable, while keeping the meaning the same.
    • Freak_NL 4y ago
      Or just a thesaurus (which is already a technique in use).
      • unsupp0rted 4y ago
        As long as the leaker doesn't copy-paste the original and start replacing words. They'll have to clean up all the hidden chars and spaces too, then pull out the thesaurus as a last step.
        • macNchz 4y ago
          I bet that a couple of passes through random different languages on Google Translate would keep the text comprehensible but be sufficiently nondeterministic to accomplish this in just a few clicks.
          • unsupp0rted 4y ago
            "I think that some translations from different languages in Google Translate will make the text understandable, but not clear enough to achieve this with just a few clicks." (English -> Turkish -> Hmong -> Xhosa -> English)
• netsharc 4y ago
  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 intensity. > People need to click "yes" to confirm being part of this by 5pm ET tomorrow, else they get 3 months severance. [...] Hah, "Click here to agree to a toxic workplace, or be fired"...
  • jmeister 4y ago
    Do you know what it's like in military organizations around the world and in history? Most men don't have a problem with authoritarian hierarchies as long as the hierarchy is justified in their view. Tech people are extremely coddled and clueless about how the rest of the world works and the moral intuitions of normal people. "The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place." https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/arendt_what-is-authority.pdf https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar...
    • ben_w 4y ago
      We may have it easy compared to the military, but then, we didn't join the military. Also, militaries do have to care about what the lowest ranks think. Not only to maintain recruiting in places without conscription, but also to avoid fragging in places that do have conscription: """Fragging is the deliberate or attempted killing by a soldier of a fellow soldier, usually a superior. U.S. military personnel coined the word during the Vietnam War, when such killings were most often attempted with a fragmentation grenade,[2] … The high number of fragging incidents in the latter years of the Vietnam War was symptomatic of the unpopularity of the war with the American public and the breakdown of discipline in the U.S. Armed Forces. Documented and suspected fragging incidents totalled nearly nine hundred from 1969 to 1972.[5]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging While I am confident that Musk's behaviour is merely close to average USA industrial employment norms and this is just us techies being shocked by what that looks like (for example, while there are stories about Amazon running out of people interested in working there, I've not heard that about Tesla, SpaceX, TBC, or Neuralink), this latter scenario is one of the possible failure modes I foresee with actually trying to colonise Mars with Starship, as there just isn't an easy way out if/when things go wrong 40 million miles from alternative employment/governance.
• lagrange77 4y ago
  Reminds me of the strategy of map companies, that planted tiny errors or fictional streets in their maps, so that they can identify other map companies, that copied their work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
  • aix1 4y ago
    The following is only tangentially related, but somewhat interesting. For most of its history the USSR systematically distorted publicly available maps of the country, misplacing or omitting streets and geographical features etc. This was done as a security measure, while accurate maps were classified. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-maps-were-faked-for-50-years.html https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-... In contrast, the classified maps were remarkably detailed: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps
    • KennyBlanken 4y ago
      China has a lot of mapmaking and GPS technology restrictions, present day, for supposedly the same reasons.
      • sllabres 4y ago
        See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China#GPS_shift_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
      • interestica 4y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Di-UVC-_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Di-UVC-_4 "Why Every Map of China is Just Slightly Wrong"
    • mhh__ 4y ago
      Soviet maps of the UK are extremely detailed
  • 4y ago
• staplung 4y ago
  It’s called whitespace watermarking and seems to be one of those ideas that keeps getting re-invented. It’s used a lot, particularly in HTML where the rendering hides the identifying spaces. It can help you figure out if someone is scrapping your content.
  • greggsy 4y ago
    Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. I recall a story about Jobs tracking down leakers in his own executive suite by telling each of them a slightly different things in private. Not sure if it worked, but it can be a very effective deterrent.
    • amelius 4y ago
      > Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. Surely the extra whitespace would disappear in the DTP systems used by the press?
      • egman_ekki 4y ago
        They could use typos in different words, though, right?
        • 9991 4y ago
          Or synonyms, or alternate grammar that’s functionally equivalent. Lots of better ways that are completely concealed, unless you see multiple drafts.
      • onion2k 4y ago
        Not if the papers printed photos of the docs.
      • thathndude 4y ago
        This is why any reputable journalist/leaker takes the information and reproduces it prior to any dissemination (hopefully destroying the original source material).
• m2fkxy 4y ago
  A variant of the barium meal test, common in espionnage.
• bkishan 4y ago
  Also worth noting that this did not work out, because their general counsel accidentally replied all to the email, giving everyone in the company a safe copy to leak.
  • xwowsersx 4y ago
    That is too funny. Reply all strikes again.
  • onion2k 4y ago
    Good way to cover your ass if the general counsel is the one doing the leaks...
  • thombat 4y ago
    "Reply-all" suggests that the same mail went to a set of recipients, but doesn't the watermarking strategy require each recipient to have their own unique copy?
    • ilyt 4y ago
      Recipient A gets their personalized copy, as does recipient B Recipient A then clicks reply-all, now everyone has copy that was personalized to A. They might even notice subtle differences between them.
      • thombat 4y ago
        But how did recipient A get a personalised copy if the mail with that copy was sent to a list of recipients? Edit: WP has the Tesla story with the counsel forwarding his copy to everyone in a new mail (presumably trying to be helpful?) So not a case of reply-all disease https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
        • Shish2k 4y ago
          > But how did recipient A get a personalised copy if the mail with that copy was sent to a list of recipients? Watermarking added by the mailing-list manager software?
• greyface- 4y ago
  Google circa 2011~2012 used unicode homoglyphs in all-employee memos for the same purpose.
  • jonhohle 4y ago
    I implemented this at Go Daddy for our internal KB around 2006/7 after someone started leaking docs. It was pretty reliable, but had some interesting failure modes: not being able to search for words with transposed glyphs, excluding code listings and other things that might be copy/pasted.
  • notRobot 4y ago
    Another comment from this thread backing this up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33625024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33625024
• zzleeper 4y ago
  From Wikipedia: After a series of leaks at Tesla Motors in 2008, CEO Elon Musk reportedly sent slightly different versions of an e-mail to each employee in an attempt to reveal potential leakers. The e-mail was disguised as a request to employees to sign a new non-disclosure agreement. The plan was undermined when the company's general counsel forwarded his own unique version of the e-mail with the attached agreement. As a result, Musk's scheme was realized by employees who now had a safe copy to leak.[4
  • dekhn 4y ago
    "Curses! Foiled again by my own insubordinates"
  • williamsmj 4y ago
    Yep. The story as Musk tells it, and as goes viral every couple of months, is a lie.
    • tb0ne 4y ago
      Where has Musk told the story?
      • williamsmj 4y ago
        https://twitter.com/pnikosis/status/1592823543498436611 https://twitter.com/pnikosis/status/1592823543498436611. Apparently that quote is from a (now deleted) tweet of his per https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/elon-musk-reveals-to-indian-follower-how-tesla-caught-employee-who-leaked-data-in-2008/articleshow/94744879.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl....
• hash872 4y ago
  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, then searched the printer logs for who printed a file with precisely that many KBs recently. Doing this, he found the leaker. (It's been a few years since I read the book so a couple of the details may be off, but that was the gist of the story)
  • FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    Printing out whistleblower letters using work hardware is not a smart idea...
    • chasd00 4y ago
      yeah i always thought the SOP was to take a picture of your screen with a camera. Print that out at home, manually mark/cut out the parts you don't want to leak, take another picture, print, and leak that copy.
  • prepend 4y ago
    I wonder about this stuff and expect they could also just look for a file of that exact size in bytes on work PCs or cloud storage. I think anyone who wants to write potentially career limiting things should exercise basic common sense like not using work computers and printers, removing fingerprinting elements, etc. In the future I expect more to do stuff like cut and paste between programs to alter the font and spacing before sharing. Or, of course, don’t leak proprietary information. There are whisleblower protection laws for illegal material that can be revealed. But leaking random company stuff, I think leads to less info being shared by the company to employees.
    • smhoff256 4y ago
      Because we all know just how great those whistleblower laws protect people right? Right?
• d23 4y ago
  Twitter 2.0 will need to be “extremely hardcore.” Truly a visionary.
  • kernal 4y ago
    I consider the removal of wine on tap extremely hardcore. Imagine rolling into the Twitter office at 10 am and not being able to fill your 2L Yeti mug with complimentary tap wine before the start of your day.
• nzach 4y ago
  Microsoft used the same idea to caught leakers working with the new dashboard for the xbox360: https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/469221-how-microsoft-caught-xbox-360-nda-breakers https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/469221-how-microsoft-cau... The difference is that in the 360 dashboard they used "decorative" rings to encode the information.
  • arantius 4y ago
    This sounds interesting. Sadly the link (to the tweet) in that article is broken. This appears to be a screenshot of the tweet in question: https://old.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/a4y3n8 https://old.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/a4y3n8
• josefresco 4y ago
  What's the best process to strip these hidden characters? Is the an app, or web service that will "clean" the copy?
  • Asdrubalini 4y ago
    Just use a for loop in Python over all characters and ignore each char that is not in the ASCII range of letters, numbers and punctuation. Or retype by hand if you don't know Python.
    • Symbiote 4y ago
      cat document | tr -dc '[A-Za-z0-9.,!@$%*()/?" -]'
  • JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    Copy paste the text into and console text editor. Should easily see the "hidden" characters, then.
  • bricss 4y ago
    RegExp
  • chii 4y ago
    if the steganography signature is unique to the user receiving the content, then you might have to diff it with someone else's to see it (otherwise, you cannot really guess where the changes are which steganographically stores your identity). If it is the same content for all users receiving the text, then you can just retype the text (not copy/paste) into a different file. Of course, authenticity comes to question if you whistleblow by doing this.
  • berkes 4y ago
    There's a rather old service to clean such copy. It's a called a printer and while it will remove spacing and other invisible characters, the process of printing onto paper hardly ever works. Despite hardware for doing so have been on market for decades.
• theknocker 4y ago
• not1ofU 4y ago
  Not sure I beleive this, I think this is parallel construction. Because why would they give away the method they used?
• tuyguntn 4y ago
  why not take a photo of email, show only the header with some blur applied, but convert the image to text before publishing?
  • evan_ 4y ago
    Or just retype it
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  For a fella who is CEO of THREE separate companies, he sure has a lot of time on his hands to do bullshit. Maybe he should have to work from the office.
• praptak 4y ago
  Some primers about avoiding the basic mistakes when leaking (don't read them from your work laptop obviously. That would be the first mistake!): https://freedom.press/news/sharing-sensitive-leaks-press/ https://freedom.press/news/sharing-sensitive-leaks-press/ https://mashable.com/article/leaking-hacking-data-nsa-anonymous-tips https://mashable.com/article/leaking-hacking-data-nsa-anonym...
• jmbwell 4y ago
  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 faithfulness, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore, and recent general infatuation with petty lords of chaos doesn’t seem to be helping. So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage.
  • registeredcorn 4y ago
    >it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends. My company is hardly some "golden child", but it generally does right by its staff, and the staff, more or less, does right by the company. Things aren't perfect, but I would say the amount of inter-office trust is about as close as anyone would reasonably expect. Problems pop up, but with a healthy amount of addressing things head on, those problems don't rot and fester. Need someone to be honest with you about the deadline of an upcoming project? Done. Need to get a hold of someone off-hours on a three day weekend? Alright, as long as it's something important and time sensitive. Need realistic feedback about a presentation you're working on. Sure. It all revolves around mutual respect, camaraderie, and clearly defined roles. When I see an upcoming issue with an area I have nothing to do with, I don't feel the need to fix it "because no one else will", but, I also don't leave it to blow up in someone else's face either. I let the right people know, or tell my boss if I'm not sure who should be involved. If I had to take a guess, maybe you work for one of those larger corporate type companies with lots of middle managers, office politics, etc.? I'd encourage you to look at getting away from that if it's weighing heavily on your ability to trust others. It's something that I dealt with for a length of time, and once I moved onto a smaller shop, the ability to trust and genuinely rely on others improved quite a bit.
• otikik 4y ago
  Thisiswhyineverusespaces.Problemsolved.
  • prox 4y ago
    But since you are the only one doing this…
    • LanceH 4y ago
      If he just pulls out the verb and puts it on the end, he can mingle with the Germans.
  • jwozn 4y ago
    ^ Surprisingly easy to read... Youmightbeontosomething
  • trinovantes 4y ago
    Zero-width spaces exist too
• defterGoose 4y ago
  Kinda surprised Elon didn't just do around spraying everyone with soapy water. Easier to implement and more sadistic.
• dsq 4y ago
  Just looking at the title I had a sudden vision of Mr Spock helping Elon by using the computer visor...
  • fuzzfactor 4y ago
    Talk about space characters . . .
• tablespoon 4y ago
  If they actually did this, it's nice that they leaked their playbook. Advice for future leakers: 1. Ask your co-worker to forward you that email (because you "accidentally deleted it"), and diff to your copy, so you know if your employer is cosplaying as the CIA. 2. Retype everything before leaking or leak crappy photos of documents on your screen (or better yet, both). 3. Leak to a journalist and make them promise to only describe or quote the documents you're sharing, and not sure the literal files. A lot of this CIA cosplay won't work without access to the leaked file.
  • mhh__ 4y ago
    Microfilm cameras if you want to cosplay as the CIA too
    • mjevans 4y ago
      Mostly not necessary these days; everyone is already expected to have a portable supercomputer with a radio, passible quality camera, microphone, and shitty text input capabilities in their pocket.
      • mhh__ 4y ago
        News to me
        • mjevans 4y ago
          What's a microfiche camera compared to a camera in every phone which is a commonly found every day item.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    ask your work nemesis to forward you the email and just leak that wholesale
    • ianferrel 4y ago
      This will work right up until they check the mail logs and/or your work nemesis says "oh yeah, I forwarded it to Bob."
• gmjosack 4y ago
  ~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 others their messages similarly had random Cyrillic characters, but different from my own. Always found it ironic that their own products (gmail/chrome) gave away their attempts at steganography.
  • myself248 4y ago
    > discovered Google doing steganography and their e-mails by accident discovered by accident that Google was doing steganography in their e-mails
    • daveslash 4y ago
      Frankly, I like the idea that they were accidentally performing steganography.
  • sundarurfriend 4y ago
    What's the context of this? Were/are you a Googler and this was in internal emails? Or was this just emails Google sends to customers? (I'm choosing to assume that this isn't about random emails other people send to Gmail addresses, that Google just messes with this way.)
    • gmjosack 4y ago
      Yea, this was for internal communication, presumably to catch leaks. I've not worked there for 10 years now so I can't speak to whether they're still doing anything like this internally but I wouldn't be surprised.
• dvngnt_ 4y ago
  there should be an AI service that rephrases given text
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• yumraj 4y ago
  Is there a mass email software that supports this? I haven't seen it. On a separate note, I'm sure that by now he's pretty much destroyed the entire culture there. So, while many folks will hang around for now, since economy, but most are possibly thinking of leaving. In the end only the most desperate will be left there, so yeah, pretty hardcore.
• colesantiago 4y ago
  just take a screenshot with a camera on the content [0], duh. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
• bparsons 4y ago
  Distributing unique, but similar documents is a pretty standard method of document control/leak detection. It was certainly not invented by Musk or anyone at Tesla.
• dogman144 4y ago
  If you’re at a company that’s incentivized to do insider threat programs - big tech, finance, govt tech, any sort of serious funding - these tactics are commonplace. If watermarked emails seems over the top, there are almost certainly IT security tools with extensive access running as a process on your machine for this use case too.
  • dogman144 4y ago
    To be more clear - if you’re doing anything other than work stuff on your work computer, bad call. It’s almost certainly logged somehow/somewhere in the company, and just depends on if the company has the staffing to check. With ithreat, there is someone checking who doesn’t care about your reddit use. But, The 1-2 blend of insider threat programs having the access and wfh productivity suspicions increasing makes me think mgmt will poke under the hood in these logs beyond I-threat concerns at some point soon.
• germandiago 4y ago
  Well done. :) Congrats Tesla.
• LightG 4y ago
  Toxic.
• 1letterunixname 4y ago
  That's genius. Watermarking with odd invisible and collation Unicode characters. The only concern is it might be easy to defeat with tools to detect Unicode confusables and invisible characters.
• boringg 4y ago
  Can I point out if you are going to leak something from your company you should probably be a lot smarter about it. Maybe it's me but I would be very paranoid about breaking trust with someone/company. Probably a personality thing though.
• tpmx 4y ago
  Now do Apple.
• silversmith 4y ago
  It warms my heart that practices we used to use in EvE Online forums to identify internet spaceship strategy leakers are now being applied more widely :)
• rnk 4y ago
  Microsoft used to do this. I worked in a startup with an exec a few years later and he admitted they did it. I think everyone does this. We had 10s of thousands of employees at Microsoft, and they'd send out these updates on windows status, like "the beta of the next release is coming in early January with these features". He said they could only vary it a little bit - I think it was spaces, maybe some dots, so an email to a large group would only have enough uniqueness to narrow it down to say 100 people. This must have been an old idea. I couldn't believe those reporters were naive enough to give up Reality Winner's original printout.
• kodah 4y ago
  Think that's bad? Check out what Zoom has been up to for years surrounding fingerprinting video.
  • EE84M3i 4y ago
    More information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829748
• GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
  People will just collude by diff-ing the delivered material going forward
• nikeee 4y ago
  There was a lawsuit that involved stealing intellectual property in Germany. A company accused google of stealing lyrics from their page [0]. They managed to prove in court that google actually took their texts by embedding a Morse code. They used ' and ` as Morse characters in their lyrics to mark their property. However, as far as I know, they lost the case anyway because the judge rules that the lyrics doesn't belong to the lyrics page, but to the song owner. [0]: https://www.golem.de/news/vorwurf-von-genius-com-google-soll-songtexte-ohne-erlaubnis-nutzen-1906-141939.html https://www.golem.de/news/vorwurf-von-genius-com-google-soll...
• cududa 4y ago
  Hello, Guy who embedded Xbox 360 serial numbers into the Xbox 360 beta dashboard UI to identify leaked pics here - there was a big HN thread on it some years ago. Just to point out, using extra spaces and different ascii space is basic steganography that's been used since WW1 and WW2. Elon brags about using spaces and other "Canary" techniques. Not super complicated Elon appears to send emails in a fixed width HTML file in a lot of cases, which gives you some extra options with ascii characters on line breaks for steganography. Using a tool I wrote a decade + ago to find inserted line breaks in images - here was what I pulled out from a screenshot of Elon's email to employees from earlier today. https://twitter.com/cullend/status/1593022922603786240/photo/1 https://twitter.com/cullend/status/1593022922603786240/photo...
  • LecroJS 4y ago
    This was the first thing this post made me think of. You blew my mind with this back when I was a kid in school. Extremely memorable. Glad to see I’m in good company in this thread.
    • cududa 4y ago
      Glad to hear you found that post/ thread interesting or mind expanding. Hope your career is going well.
• seanhunter 4y ago
  He who would keep a secret, must keep secret that he has a secret to keep - Goethe, I think. Seriously if you’re doing a hiding in plain sight technique like steganography the last thing you should do is boast about the fact you’re doing it.