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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 defect
by 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 agoPrinting out whistleblower letters using work hardware is not a smart idea...
- chasd00 4y agoyeah 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 agoI 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 agoBecause we all know just how great those whistleblower laws protect people right? Right?
- jstarfish 4y agoWhistleblower laws don't work out so well for those who threaten to blow the whistle as a negotiating tactic. It's not retaliation if they fire you before you make the disclosure...
- prepend 4y agoI think they work out ok, I suppose. The big “whistleblowers” over the pas few years haven’t actually been whistleblowers because they leaked confidential secrets. So Reality Winner, Chesley Manning, etc were convicted independent of any whistleblower laws. And why Snowden had to do an illegal act to reveal. But I think these scenarios are totally different from these Twitter leaks where there’s no whistleblowing or illegal activity revealed. But I think there are tons of examples where the law worked and whistleblowers were protected and even financially rewarded, https://www.phillipsandcohen.com/successful-cases/ https://www.phillipsandcohen.com/successful-cases/
- sidewndr46 4y agoOn a modern computer, all copying & pasting between programs would do is just create an exact trail of what is on your computer. Copy -> Paste is not metadata free by any means. If your final target was Notepad or similar, it should drop all the metadata. But in that case, just start with Notepad.
- brk 4y agoMaybe I'm in the minority, but I would generally assume that everybody has at least 1 printer at home. I'm also not aware of many printers that keep logs for long durations, but perhaps their shared network printers were logging to some kind of system log.
- prepend 4y agoIt’s higher than I expected at 70% of Americans having home printers. [0] I expected it to be super old but there must be old people with printers. I get annoyed when companies expect me to print stuff at home. I prefer companies to assume that no one has a home printer and plan for it by including return labels and whatnot. [0] https://metafacts.com/home-printer-trends-in-the-us-tupdate/ https://metafacts.com/home-printer-trends-in-the-us-tupdate/
- bojan 4y agoI wonder how many of those printers are actually still functioning. There was a time once where you actually had to print stuff (anyone remembers MapQuest maps?), so I'm guessing there are still a lot of printers from that era collecting dust at people's homes.
- rtkwe 4y agoI swapped over to a laser printer for that exact reason. There's still a few things a year I need to print and the laser printer stays working through the lulls where I always had issues with inkjets clogging up.
- bee_rider 4y agoErr, did he find the leaker or just anybody who’d printed that file? Hypothetically one person could have printed it at work while the leaker printed it at home, right?
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y agoPerhaps Musk's shoddy logic is what's currently pushing Twitter to the brink!
- bee_rider 4y agoI’m sure the belief that one can find a technological solution to any problem, including social and organizational ones, wouldn’t help.
- dekhn 4y ago
- dang 4y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, e.g. snark, putdowns, and swipes? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you not to, repeatedly. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dekhn 4y agoYou haven't asked me repeatedly to stop doing this. It's the first time. I see far worse crap from other users all the time. It kind of looks like you're protecting paulg and elon from criticism. You did shut my account down previously but it was determined you were mistaken.
- dang 4y agoThere were at least these occasions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30249117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30249117 (Feb 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29895865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29895865 (Jan 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346858 (Nov 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17682627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17682627 (Aug 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668442 (April 2014) Since you replied to most of those, I assume you saw them. > You did shut my account down previously but it was determined you were mistaken. We weren't mistaken. We rate limited your account correctly because you were breaking the site guidelines. I removed the rate limit because you emailed and asked us, and because at that point I looked at your recent history and it seemed your comments had been fine for a while. When we take a rate limit off, and then an account reverts to its old guidelines-breaking habits, we put the rate limit back on. Please fix this so we don't have to. It's nothing personal—we're just trying to protect the forum from poisoning itself. This has zero to do with protecting any famous individual from criticism—if you or anyone else doubts this, just do some comment searches using HN Search (there's a search box at bottom of each page here) and you'll soon disabuse yourself of that illusion.
- njovin 4y agoThe 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fooqux 4y agoHe searched the printer logs. Presumably when Word sends stuff to the printer, it doesn't bother with all the extraneous garbage it puts in files. Printer communication hasn't changed much in decades.
- moron4hire 4y agoIt is also possible he's just a lunatic who fired an innocent person.
- savanaly 4y agoWhat 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.
- blarghyblarg 4y agoalmost 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.
- dmix 4y ago
- bArray 4y agoTo be really secure when leaking typed documents, I get 5 colleagues together and we whisper the leak along the line, so that many of the words are changed by the end. For each word we are randomly spaced to defeat Musk's space-based detection. We then take the output of this and transcribe it over an old HAM radio to a friend in China. He lives on a farm, so he then dictates it to a chicken who writes it in the sand. He quickly takes a picture before the wind erases it. He then contacts a US media publisher under the name 'Whu Lee K', and they print it as is! What a wonderful time to be alive.
- orangepurple 4y agoThis is called parallel construction. The story as told didn't actually happen IMO.
- xeromal 4y agoI don't know the truth of this specific story, but I will note that the Ashley Vance book wasn't an autobiography. I believe musk asked him not to write the book.
- koonsolo 4y agoI thought printers had a unique fingerprint that's embedded in every document they print?
- ranting-moth 4y agoLaser printers do yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
- ranting-moth 4y agoYet another reason to lock your screen when you stand up. The guy could have printed it from someone else's computer. It seems incredibly naive to print out a leak letter from work.
- flanbiscuit 4y agoLet's say a person was aware that tracing in this manner was possible but they still needed to use the office printer. What if they wrote a letter and also added pages of other additional paragraphs. They print all those pages but only mail the one page and shred the rest. This would show a much bigger file kb-wise in the printer log and would not get caught.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago> Figuring that the leaker printed the letter at Tesla offices (i.e. likely didn't have a printer at home) sounds like this was likely an internal report (which would have been printed at the office as part of one's work), which later made its way to the media, rather than some letter stealthily written and sent to the media (which would have been unlikely to be printed at the office)
- dagmx 4y agoNot to be a party pooper , but afaik this story didn’t happen and has actually been told for years attributed to various different people and agencies.
- maigret 4y agoThat’s how legends get built.
- greesil 4y agoWho still uses a printer at work?
- Arubis 4y agoIf true, that's technically fascinating and clever. It's also the CEO of the company taking time from the shareholders to hunt down and hurt someone. Don't work for people like this.
- rideontime 4y agoAbsolutely fake. The tell is that Musk himself did all the sleuthing.
- yborg 4y agoDon't most large office printers watermark all pages anyway? Our Ricoh did.
- tsss 4y agoThere's no way someone as stupid as him thought of that.
- thih9 4y agoMoral of the story, if you’re about to leak data, don’t use a company printer. Or, for that matter, anything that would log that leak and could be traced to you. Like other commenters, I find it hard to believe that this actually happened.
- mandeepj 4y ago> 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 I read the book but did not remember that part. So, I searched it. You almost wrote verbatim. What are the chances a leaker(s) would print before leaking? Very low or none. So, that practice has very slim chances of success. The one in the tweet is a bit better. But has a escape route. Either - try to grammatically correct or paraphrase - it before leaking.
- boringg 4y agoI was always curious if you could search printer logs for details of who printed what at a company but never really spent much thought process on it. Clearly you can.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- salmaanp 4y agoif they were using mac, better way would just be to check /var/spool/cups and see if the file is present.