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Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

The simplest answer is that this didn’t happen and it’s just a myth.

I agree; this story is apocryphal. I was annoyed enough that I did some research into the story. Via this Atlantic article[1], I found the original Valleywag post[2] containing the letter from the employee. It's worth noting that the letter from the employee is pure text (i.e. not a scan of a letter), is only 170 words long, and has a couple of misspellings. The Valleywag post provides a paraphrasing of what the employee told them, followed by what seems to be the entire body of the email that they received.

The Musk detective work is described by Vance in a footnote:

“Musk would later discover the identity of this employee in an ingenious way. He copied the text of the letter into a Word document, checked the size of the file, sent it to a printer, and looked over the logs of printer activity to find one of the same size. He could then trace that back to the person who had printed the original file. The employee wrote a letter of apology and resigned.”

This leaves me a with more than a few questions:

1. Why would this email/letter have been printed out? It's short, informal, and did not seem to contain any corporate materials that would require access from a work computer. Surely, this would be better sent as an email from a personal computer? All I can think of is that the employee did print some kind of private company information (perhaps as proof?) to send to Valleywag. But wouldn't this mean that the print-job sizes wouldn't match since there would be printed materials not made public? It seems beyond insane to physically mail a tip to a gossip site that was built around emailed tips.

2. If this was sent as a physical letter, why would the quote in the article contain the typos? Why would they even take the time to type up the entire letter when the article summarizes every single point that the Tesla employee mentioned? Shouldn't they have taken some care to not verbatim reproduce text that could have gotten their source into trouble? I will say that the minimal journalistic standards employed by former Gawker-network sites provide convenient explanations to these questions, so these aren't particularly damning.

3. Is this really all the text that was sent to Valleywag? The quoted part of the letter provides no salutation or signature. Sending this text exactly as quoted as a physical letter seems bizarre, even for an anonymous tip.

4. Would the sizes of the files sent to the printer even match up considering the document metadata? This actually seems somewhat plausible.

5. Would the print-job really be the best way to figure out who the leaker was? In October 2008, before the letter was written, Tesla only had 363 employees[3] and may have laid off a few dozen of them before this letter was written. This employee claims to have joined in 2004. A Wired article from 2006[4] mentions a meeting of 30 Tesla employees and board members in December 2004. It seems like there are a very small number of people who could have been the potentially leaker. How many of those people were using the corporate printers the day after the mentioned all-hands meeting to print a single page document?

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I imagine that this story was told to present Musk as smarter than everyone else while also threatening disloyalty, which seems to be a frequent Musk bugbear. The bit about the caught employee writing a letter of apology and then resigning (amidst large-scale layoffs at Tesla in 2008!) also seems a little too cute, in a chain-email-atheist-professor-humiliated-by-freshman-Albert-Einstein kind of way.

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[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/elon-...

[2] https://www.gawker.com/5071621/tesla-motors-has-9-million-in...

[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-oct-25-fi-tesla...

[4] https://www.wired.com/2006/08/tesla-3/

The wired.com link doesn't work me ("Sorry, something has gone wrong"). Archived copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221116003941/https://www.wired...

You could use bounds from x KB to y KB if you know the version of Word used and try to approach.

It is a difficult task, anyways.

The size of the saved word file (depending on exactly how it was saved and what version) will vary depending on how it was edited, and yeah, what metadata is there, so this seems...wrong.

Honestly 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.

they 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".

You can also easily narrow it down to a time period. Find out when leak occurred and then look at prints shortly before that.

How likely is it that there would just happen to be a file with exactly the same wrong size in the printer logs?

I‘d say if the letter was short it‘s pretty likely.

Maybe there was few % error but no other candidate.

Which printers in that timeframe ever directly printed word files?

It would be the resulting spool file that gets measured, not the source Doc file.

He 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.

Still. 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.

I would imagine any two computers at Tesla have a very good chance of having identical normal.dot, and font can be determined by looking at the letter. For a letter, who is using tabs for anything but the start of paragraphs? Even if it's not perfect, it's unlikely to change the size of a word document (which is likely <25 kB to begin with) by a full kilobyte.

Basically all it would tell you is the number of word documents with approximately the same amount of text were printed, plus or minus about a paragraph. Letters aren't frequently printed and the contents of the leak would almost certainly limit the number of suspects to a small handful of people. It's not hard at all to believe that in a group of ~50 people and a time window of ~1 week you might only have one even close match.

Perhaps it wasn't an exact byte match, but close enough to only 1 print job size within a reasonable time frame.

Exactly 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....

... 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.

What part would be illegal?

Certainly possible, but also relies on the assumption that this was done on company equipment. When leaking info under a vindictive boss I would think opsec rule #1 is avoid company equipment as much as possible. Even without a printer at home, it's quite easy to send a print job to a local office or shipping store.

Data exfiltration is an extremely dangerous risk in the world of corporate espionage, especially for a company like Tesla that is trying to be first to market with something as massive as FSD.

There is no way I would send anything to an external print shop from company equipment; they are almost certainly on top of that as well.

Sheesh, Tesla FSD would be even worse than the "secret Coca-Cola formula", no one would even want to be in the same computer with it.

Now, production cost figures and schedules ...

This has gotten me genuinely curious, I wonder what the safest way to get a document like that onto your own device is. Printing it on a work printer doesn't seem ideal, but I don't really know what the best approach is. Maybe emailing it to an outside address or sharing it as a document via Dropbox or similar? Copying to physical storage? All of those seem fairly easy to monitor as well though.

If any infosec experts feel like chiming in I'd love to learn more.

Anything done on a corporate machine needs to be assumed monitored. The paranoid approach would be to fully power off the machine, take the hard drive out, then use an independent machine to mount and read the data off that. Now, if they suspect that approach, or they suspect you personally, there will likely be evidence of your hardware tampering. But it would thwart automated mass-surveillance solutions.

Hard drive encryption makes this difficult.

Take photo of screen with phone camera, carry it home, OCR. If you're really paranoid you don't want to send the document's bytes off your system or use any unusual program (e.g. steganography) to edit them.

> Maybe emailing it to an outside address

Easily detected.

> sharing it as a document via Dropbox or similar

If you use a TLS-inspecting proxy/VPN, this will be detected. Otherwise, it depends on how much monitoring is going on, but at best they could suspect it.

> Copying to physical storage?

At my work, USB drives are disabled by MDM.

You could use transfer the files over SSH. Even if you have an MitM SSH-inspecting VPN, once the SSH channel is established, you could tunnel a second SSH connection through the established insecure SSH session.

Even then, with enough logging, you could detect that all local files were accessed sequentially which would raise a red flag.

There's nothing you can do to prevent insider espionage that wouldn't raise false positives and block legitimate work, but you could at least detect it.

It will always be a game of cat and mouse. Your protections for leaking are limited to legal whistleblower protections against retaliation, so odds are anything suggested here will potentially be traceable or suspicious, which may invite further scrutiny.

Ironically, we had an employee appear to exfiltrate data through a print shop. They almost got away with it unnoticed.

The USB stick they used to make the transfer contracted ransomware from the public terminal, which put everyone on high alert when it was next introduced into the corporate network.

Or take A picture of the letter Or retype the letter using leaker’s own smartphone.

Could 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

It's probably not the only bit of evidence. "Hmm, it's about the same size, it was printed at about the right time and... yeah it sounds like *that* guy, let's see what else he printed - oh, nothing? Cool."

> 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.

Or have a printer at home on stand-by for your leak press releases. If I were Musk, I would have fired him/her not for being a snitch, but for his/her sloppiness and overall carelessness and lack of discipline.

Is that so unlikely? They would be on the same network, same configuration.

You could filter on time and size and then get a subset of likely candidates and whittle it down to the expected people.

It is also possible he's just a lunatic who fired an innocent person.

Or 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

Yeah 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.

Looking at twitter these days I sure have a feeling this is not super unlikely.

More important is spreading the perception he was able to sleuth down who the leaker was, to deter future leakers.

I 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".

It'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.

This is a good way to fire innocent employees who had the audacity to edit a document after they’ve printed it.

What 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.

It'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.

This 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?

I didn't mean to claim other than that anything is possible. I was just saying the original theory put forward wasn't internally logical.

almost 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.

Sounds like a fun project any hacker would get distracted by.

You 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.

If 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.

In 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.

The 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.

Agreed - 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).

I 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.

This 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.

I can imagine that a company actually saves everything being printed for security / auditing reasons, along with who issued the print request, etc.

I think such a company would equally want to not retain such records (at least not indefinitely), for fear of discovery in legal processes, etc.

Or most likely laziness.

Or a fortuitous combination of the two...

Doing that suggests they think that the threat from insiders >>> outsiders.

It always is. Insiders have more access. They are trusted. That makes them a much greater threat if they decide to do harm.

I 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.

Well when the concern is leaked internal memos, that is a very reasonable assumption.

OP 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.

Same 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 ?

I 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.

From what I've heard of their engineering practices, it would be shocking if any deployment they have is homogeneous

had 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!

id 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.

Parallel construction.

To 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.

Are you not worried the chicken is a Musk informant? Shouldn't you be using a range of animals who each only have access to part of the message?

Chickens are well known for being secretive creatures. I'm yet to hear one to repeat anything that has been told to them.

Not 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.

That’s how legends get built.

Printing out whistleblower letters using work hardware is not a smart idea...

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.

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.

Because we all know just how great those whistleblower laws protect people right? Right?

I 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/

Whistleblower 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...

On 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.

This is called parallel construction. The story as told didn't actually happen IMO.

I 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.

Yet 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.

> 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)

Absolutely fake. The tell is that Musk himself did all the sleuthing.

If 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.

Moral 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.

> 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.

Let'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.

I 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.

I thought printers had a unique fingerprint that's embedded in every document they print?

Laser printers do yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

Who still uses a printer at work?

Don't most large office printers watermark all pages anyway? Our Ricoh did.

There's no way someone as stupid as him thought of that.

if they were using mac, better way would just be to check /var/spool/cups and see if the file is present.

Maybe 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.

It’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/

I 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.

I 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.

Yes, I love my laser printer. It's somewhere around 10 years old, and has printed a grand total of 99 pages. But it's still happily using the same toner it came with, while an inkjet's ink would have dried out and needed replacing countless times.

And I walk to a nearby copy shop for my printing needs. At maybe twice a year it's a rare enough occasion that I refuse to keep a printer myself.

That's what I do for photo printing. I use my laser for things like maps, tickets, instructions and forms. Love using it to print out instructions for use in the shop, where I can get my greasy fingers all over the paper, and not on my nice clean instruction manual.... When I need some color photos printed, I head to the print shop.

I do shooting sports so I print a lot of targets for that too.

I had an old HP printer from 2009 that I finally got rid of this year. The case was broken, the tray was falling off, and it spent years collecting dust. It still worked! Only the ink dried out. I'm curious about the reliability of printers, and how often people have to replace them.

Yea i have a printer; a decent one (laser iirc) for my wifes college papers. We've not hooked it up in years though, and offhand i'm not even sure how to use it.. that's how long it's been lol. Hell, i'm not even exactly sure where it is ..

My wife wanted a photo printer. At first I told her it was a ridiculously primitive and pointless idea, but I went along with it since I had a bonus burning a hole in my pocket

I have to admit, it turned out to be pretty cool. I hadn't used a printer in years for anything personal, and it turns out you can print professional-looking glossy photos for like 15 cents each between ink and glossy photo paper. Now we have a ton of nice family photos all over the walls, and I printed out a selfie from my WoW character when our guild killed some raid boss together and mixed it in with the other pics

My c64 has a great working dotmatrix printer. A home computer without a printer is a modern invention. I would expect if the employee had a computer they would have a printer.

I would expect the employee to have a modern computer.

Corporate networks tend to keep printer logs for extremely long durations.

Also, printers at home are incredibly useful. I'm surprised more people don't have them. Especially now that online shopping (and therefore online returns) are so much more common and require printing return labels.

I have occasion to actually need to print something about twice a year. I don't know how it is that we live such drastically different lifestyles that you find them so incredibly useful.

I print once or twice a month--return labels, random home admin (taxes or city stuff), and I prefer paper boarding passes (w/ backup on my phone) because they're less fussy for a number of reasons than the phone. I also print documents that I need to carefully read or edit, because I am easily distracted when reading/editing boring stuff on a computer and can waste too much time writing about using printers on HN.

I typically also only print 2-3 times a year as well. But those times are sensitive-ish documents (one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet, even though it’s submitted electronically) and I don’t want them printed on a printer I don’t own (paranoia). (And my printer is not connected to the network, I connect via USB).

> one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet

...what year is this? Like, I have some questions:

1) Why keep hard copies of documents created electronically when there are so many more redundant, more secure, and more convenient ways keep the electronic versions themselves?

2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?

> 2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?

Well, it includes social-security numbers for starters, and may also include bank account routing information (where to send the refund check, or withdraw in case of extra payment needed).

1) It's been more than once that we've seen hackers completely wipe people's digital lives? I mean, how problematic will logging in to many of these services be if Google decides to lock your account?

2) As an American example, ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another. Simply put trying to figure out other peoples security and sensitivity sensibilities is not something you have all the details on and are making vast assumptions.

> It's been more than once that we've seen hackers completely wipe people's digital lives? I mean, how problematic will logging in to many of these services be if Google decides to lock your account?

There are still much more convenient and technically superior methods than using physical paper copies if that is your concern.

> ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another.

Using "unscrupulous, if not criminal, activity" as an example in this instance doesn't seem like the best argument.

Technically superior is a very biased argument... A safe with a key is a very well established security mechanism with a pretty easily traceable chain of custody. Someone has to physically be at the location of the files to get the files.

Any digital record has a huge number of failure modes. For security you'll want to encrypt, when encrypted you'll now have another piece of data you need to secure and backup. You have to ensure the backup services are secure. If any of these become insecure how do you trace the insecure accesses? If it was accessed from overseas what do you do about it?

Criminal activity is common, but lets go with something that would be criminal in one country and not in another... This gets very messy with cloud services where some other government can request the information. With a safe you have to get the local government to sign off on a warrant.

Honestly, printers have gotten so cheap that the pain in the ass they can save when needed would make them useful to have for even that low of a volume. Printing a return label means I don't have to drive to a shipper. Your cheapest printers nowadays can scan and sometimes fax, which is useful for when legal or other requirements force you to submit a signed document. I'm not a fan of digital tickets for travel and events due to the apps being garbage and the severe consequences in case of technical problems, so these are easily printed as well.

As crappy as modern printers are, they provide an oversized amount of peace of mind for me.

None of those are significant problems in my life I guess, certainly not enough to justify even dedicating any space to a piece of electronic equipment that I will use infrequently enough to be frustrated by whatever way it has decided to not work when I do want to use it.

Amazon returns no longer require printing out labels, so someone who does most/all their online ordering via Amazon wouldn't need a printer.

Only for things bought and sold through amazon. If you get something sent directly from a seller returns have you print out a label.

I need to print return stickers for Amazon in EU.

Interesting. I’m germany we love paper but amazon returns work without the need to print a label at home.

In Austria you do need to print the label. How dos returning without a label work? I mean how does the post know where to ship the package?

At least in the US, Amazon has arrangements with major shipping companies like UPS and FedEx. So if you want to return something, Amazon says "Bring the item to your local UPS store and have them scan this QR code." The QR code gives UPS the shipping information it needs.

I just did a similar return for an Ebay package, but with USPS. At least in that case there's definitely a label, it's just a matter of who prints it. You could print it yourself from an attachment on the email, or show a QR code at the post office and they'd print it.

>Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would generally assume that everybody has at least 1 printer at home.

I haven’t seen a home printer since I moved out. In all these years I’ve only needed to use a printer once (sheet music when I was learning piano).

It’s just not that common to use paper anymore, aside from school projects.

School projects and super-handy things like being able to print coloring pages on-demand for most any topic one can think up, are probably a big part of why they're still so common. It is so damn nice to have a printer if you have kids of most any age.

I've also yet to find a superior UI to printed pages for running RPGs. Books are great, iPads are great, laptops can be OK, but for the core material you need for a given session, there's nothing in the world I know of that beats ~20-30 pages of printed notes and excerpted bits of PDF books & some randomly-generated junk from the Web for each session, so you have only expected-to-be-relevant info in it. Nothing better when you're actually at the table. I mean, you could do the same thing writing it by hand if you have very neat handwriting, but being able to mix together your own notes and e.g. NPC template-blocks, custom maps, and commercial material pulled from books, is awesome and saves tons of time when prepping. You can achieve something similar with just an iPad, but it's still slower and more awkward to actually use—though I do have other things I use tablets for at the table, that they excel at.

I haven't needed to print anything at home in over a decade.

> everybody has at least 1 printer at home

why would anyone have more than one at home?

A photo printer and some fast laser printer for example.

Err, 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?

Perhaps Musk's shoddy logic is what's currently pushing Twitter to the brink!

I’m sure the belief that one can find a technological solution to any problem, including social and organizational ones, wouldn’t help.

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