8 ms·
The 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 th
by njovin 4y ago
The 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 agoSounds like a fun project any hacker would get distracted by.
- stavros 4y agoYou wouldn't do that though, would you? You'd type the thing up, print it, see that the printer received a 4.7 KB (or whatever) doc and look for a 4-6 KB doc the week of the leak, and then you have 100 documents to go through, rather than 100000.
- capitol_ 4y agoIt's also possible that he calculated the number of bytes, searched the logs, didn't find anything and then tweaked his numbers until something matched. And then fired that random person to make a statement and lied about how he found out who to fire.
- politician 4y agoThis approach would work in isolation, but by failing to find the true leaker would result in them being empowered to leak more over time. Is there evidence that Tesla has a lot of regular leaks?
- savanaly 4y agoI didn't mean to claim other than that anything is possible. I was just saying the original theory put forward wasn't internally logical.
- moffkalast 4y agoLooking at twitter these days I sure have a feeling this is not super unlikely.
- Workaccount2 4y agoI would assume there was also at least a minor degree of due diligence, such as "Would this person actually have had the knowledge to write letter".
- marcusverus 4y agoIt'd be even easier than that. Walk to the person's desk and ask them to bring up the document that they printed on ${printer} at ${time}. If he can't produce a document of the correct size, he's your guy.
- elliekelly 4y agoThis is a good way to fire innocent employees who had the audacity to edit a document after they’ve printed it.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- mhh__ 4y agoOr lying. When you are rich or famous people or in vogue socially let you get away with these stories e.g. Consider feynmans "I'm modest but look at my genius"-isms
- tsol 4y agoYeah exactly. My thought was he probably found the leaker in a much more mundane way, but being undeniably great at PR he decided to spice up the story with this little bit of detective work. It sounds so clever you want to believe it, even if it's pretty impractical(not impossible though!). You know what they say, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
- VectorLock 4y agoMore important is spreading the perception he was able to sleuth down who the leaker was, to deter future leakers.
- brookst 4y agoStill. He’d have to have the same normal.dot, make the same space/tab choices, same fonts, etc. And in a large company, how many ~1 page letters get printed? What are the odds that there is only a single match in the entire company? I take this story similar to the binary coded space story: more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter future leakers than true stories about catching them in the past.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoCould be the case that there were only a handful of things printed at the whole company in a week, considering how obsolete paper has been getting
- lr4444lr 4y agoPerhaps it wasn't an exact byte match, but close enough to only 1 print job size within a reasonable time frame.
- barelysapient 4y agoExactly 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 all larking off. I later learned his technique was to open the dropbox admin tools to see the location of someone before calling them. "So, BarelySapient, where are you working at today?", he'd ask in a cheerful tone. But in reality, he was testing employee truthfulness. Every call. He later fired one of my co-workers when they reported to be working from home, but dropbox reported them somewhere in the Florida keys....
- mschuster91 4y ago... 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.
- smt88 4y agoIf he had access to printer logs, he would know exactly what everyone printed and when they did it. Networked printers store a lot of information about what is being printed.
- pixl97 4y agoIn general a lot of metadata is kept, but very rarely is the full print content kept (though in some organizations it may be for security review). The difficulty here is figuring what metadata is relevant, in this case size was the most important.
- Someone 4y agoThe OP talks about the size in kilobytes, not bytes. That will almost certainly give false positives, but if you limit the time range, it may not be that bad. Not a bad idea for initial filtering, I think, but I doubt it would hold up in court on itself.
- tomhallett 4y agoAgreed - the goal isn't "the KB's prove you are guilty". It's metadata which serves as a means to reduce the number of computers you need to examine with a more complex/manual search (deleted files, temporary/corrupted files, word document history, interviewing the employee, comparing the material in the document with the role/responsibilities of the employee, etc).
- throwntoday 4y agoI think you're forgetting that he could just re-print the file once he had located which printer it was on to verify. Once verified it's the file in question, you could easily check which device sent it to the printer.
- courgette 4y agoSame here, maybe Tesla as a homogeneous word deployment? I’m sure between various version there is difference in what is produced. Unless you can ask word for the equivalent of a postscript ?
- thegeomaster 4y agoI believe the printer logs would contain the size of a Postscript-like equivalent, not the docx itself. I wonder if the story is missing the detail of submitting the new Word file to a printer and checking the size. Or he fired someone random where Word doc size == printer input size.
- some_random 4y agoFrom what I've heard of their engineering practices, it would be shocking if any deployment they have is homogeneous
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jnsie 4y agohad the exact same thought. if anyone works in-office and has the time/capacity (don't get fired) to do this with some colleagues, it'd be a fun and interesting experiment!
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI can imagine that a company actually saves everything being printed for security / auditing reasons, along with who issued the print request, etc.
- mattkrause 4y agoDoing that suggests they think that the threat from insiders >>> outsiders.
- voakbasda 4y agoIt always is. Insiders have more access. They are trusted. That makes them a much greater threat if they decide to do harm.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI think that ... certain nations ... are quite good at playing "the long game," and often have their plants hired by companies; sometimes at fairly senior/sensitive levels. They may not even start phoning home, until they have had a few promotions.
- jjk166 4y agoWell when the concern is leaked internal memos, that is a very reasonable assumption.
- datadata 4y agoI think such a company would equally want to not retain such records (at least not indefinitely), for fear of discovery in legal processes, etc.
- dmix 4y agoOr most likely laziness.
- 4y ago
- schemescape 4y agoThe simplest answer is that this didn’t happen and it’s just a myth.
- 411111111111111 4y agoHonestly speaking, the story sounds somewhat believable to me. They likely misidentified the leaker with that silly analysis and fired them on the spot, would be just the usual modus operandi of musk.
- leereeves 4y agoHow likely is it that there would just happen to be a file with exactly the same wrong size in the printer logs?
- brodo 4y agoI‘d say if the letter was short it‘s pretty likely.
- whatwherewhy 4y agoMaybe there was few % error but no other candidate.
- cma 4y agoWhich printers in that timeframe ever directly printed word files?
- simondotau 4y agoIt would be the resulting spool file that gets measured, not the source Doc file.
- chasd00 4y agothey probably narrowed it down to one person and approached them with the logs and "admit and be fired or don't admit and legal (and all the bad/expensive stuff that comes with that) will be engaged to get to the bottom of it starting with you".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- snickerbockers 4y agoOP says he compared them in terms of KBs, if this is taken literally then he didn't check to see if they were exactly the same length. Assuming that the two word documents are actually identical except for metadata, I wouldn't expect the size discrepancy to be on the order of kilobytes. Still a reckless way to identify the leaker, there's plenty of reasonable doubt if all they have to go on is the size of the document that was printed.
- rurp 4y agoThis was my first thought as well. Is the file size really that precisely deterministic from a mammoth program like Word given different dates, machines, versions, etc? Given that Musk is not the most reliable narrator, to say the least, I'm skeptical of this story. I'm sure he sees plenty of utility in appearing omniscient to frighten potential leakers.
- nimbius 4y agoid assume a billionaire heir to a diamond mine with an econ BA parsing various different models of printer logs for fifteen offices late into the evening would have discredited the quote entirely, But the cult of personality implores me to insist even Stalin himself did something similar in both Haskell and emacs.
- lowbloodsugar 4y agoParallel construction.