Gawker: valleywag, paranoia

Mark Zuckerberg's Status Update: Paranoid as Hell

Owen Thomas — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:19:03 EDT

Is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hunting leakers? His internal memo about CFO Gideon Yu's departure got forwarded to bloggers. Perhaps he was hoping that would happen, and not just so his spin would get out.

In her haste to get the scoop, AllThingsD blogger Kara Swisher posted a version of Zuckerberg's memo which had a repeated paragraph. She's since eliminated the repeat, but we captured it:

Catch the differences? One says "will report," the other says "will be reporting." One uses treasurer Cipora Herman's last name, the other omits it. One says "we are fortunate," while the other uses the contracted form "we're." And one says Peter Currie will be "an advisor," while the other says only "advisor."

That's not the only oddity about the email. "Several versions I got of this memo had different punctuation in various places," Swisher notes in an update.

Why bother sending employees individual copies of a mass email with subtle changes throughout? There's only one reason to bother: Using the changes as tell-tale clues to identify whose copy got forwarded. That's what Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk did recently in an attempt to find leakers. Each of those changes can, in theory, serve as an identifier; assemble a series of unique identifiers, and it's possible to trace a particular version of an email to a particular employee.

If Zuckerberg is really wasting time on games like this, it means that he has completely failed as a leader. It's a humbling admission that he no longer enjoys his employees' trust and confidence. And it's an insult, too — that he thinks his employees aren't smart enough to figure out what he's doing. Of course they are. It's just one more reason for him to resign immediately, before he does more damage to the company he started.

Good news: Large Hadron Collider's threat to planet still months away

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:00:00 EDT

Little boys and girls like to smash toy trucks into each other to see what happens. Physicists? They prefer firing particles through a 17-mile long inner tube under Switzerland and France and seeing what happens when they collide. The goal is to create a mini-Big Bang and unleash a new era of understanding about the world around us, which will of course lead to bigger and meaner weapons of mass destruction which we'll say Iran is trying to build so we can invade them. But some scientists worry that the experiment, called the Large Hadron Collider, will create a black hole that destroys the entire world. They turned the thing on yesterday anyway and good news: we still exist. "It will be weeks or months before two particles ever crash together in the giant tube," reports Reuters. Plenty of time for worrying!(Photo by AP/Nolfi)

We know not our own strength

ndouglas — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 14:51:57 EST

...or our own trade-secret violations, I guess. A tipster tells us there's a Google lockdown:

I have a friend who works at Google. i asked what the word is internally about valleywag. [She/he] said [she/he]'s been warned, along with a bunch of people in her department not to give you tips, passwords or anything. [she/he] stopped short of saying there was a company wide email sent out...
[She/he] claims that you have passwords and access to their intranet, at least thats what [she/he] was told. so [she/he] was warned with the rest of [his/her] department not to give anything out.

Gee, Google, there ARE research methods that don't involve using you. And there aren't exactly mega-hackers working here — more like an English major. But it's cool to see the security team snap into action.

Anyone else hear about a lockdown? Is Yahoo telling people they must leak to a trashy gossip blog? E-mail tips@valleywag.com and save me from doing real work.