Hacker News Reader

Comment by a-googler | Hacker News Reader

Some asshat leaked the "CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL ONLY" memo. Good work, (presumably) newly unemployed person. You won't even get the goods.

View on HN

With presumably 23,000 people getting that email, unless the person (if only one did) was not careful at all, I don't think they could be discovered. (I'm not sure that anyone would really care either)

Google found and terminated the employee responsible.

Got a link for that?

No, but Google notified employees internally that the person responsible was terminated. If you have a friend at Google just ask.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/10/technology/google_brain_drai...

I hope you mean fired.

Wow, I wonder how. Presumably they could have encoded a watermark into the text by changing out synonyms. All you'd need is 15 words with two possible synonyms.

...Or, more simply, they probably used packet sniffing/similar?

..or they are just great at search.

I didn't see that they had the full email (http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bonus-and-raise-2010-1...).

In that case, that person wasn't very careful. One easy way to identify people would be to fingerprint each email by permuting words and sentences here and there. You don't need that many to make each email unique. That would actually seem very Google-esque to do that :)

But I'd be curious to know if there is a simpler version: sniffed traffic, browser history, Sent folder...

Supposedly the deal applies to previous employees as well. An ex-googler friend of mine was notified presumably so that he might actually come back.

Don't people typically ask for 30% when they change jobs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com