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A $1 Billion Email Gaffe
Jake writes in with the story behind an explosive NYTimes scoop last week. It seems that the Times's pharmaceutical industry reporter, Alex Berenson, scored a page-one blockbuster when he revealed that Eli Lilly was looking to reach a settlement with federal prosecutors over the company's alleged inappropriate marketing of anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa. A settlement figure of $1 billion was mentioned. This scoop dropped into Berenson's inbox when a lawyer for one of Lilly's retained firms mis-addressed an email to a colleague with the same last name as that of the Times reporter. Some online observers are speculating that auto-complete is to blame, but this has not been confirmed.
Update: 02/08 17:19 GMT by KD : Jake writes in with an update: it seems that while Berenson did receive a misdirected e-mail from Pepper Hamilton, that e-mail did not contain a detailed description of the status of the Eli Lilly settlement talks. Berenson got his story from other sources.
Update: 02/08 17:19 GMT by KD : Jake writes in with an update: it seems that while Berenson did receive a misdirected e-mail from Pepper Hamilton, that e-mail did not contain a detailed description of the status of the Eli Lilly settlement talks. Berenson got his story from other sources.
I notice the software is being blamed rather than the user.
Don't click the link, goes to shock site and screwes with your browser.
this is my sig
If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please disregard and forget this posting.
You are legally binded from reading, forwarding, printing, copying, remembering, discussing or in any other way acknowledging this post.
I am planning on robbing the bank on Fifth and Elm. Do not alert the police. Meet me at the warehouse after.
captcha:overlook
Tired of that pesky work getting in the way of having fun? No problems, with our new email auto-complete, work will never be a problem again. Tired of looking competent. Too few opportunties to end your career over a simple typo? Problem solved with auto-complete. People will blame you the dumb user for making the smallest mistake at any time of the day or night and regardless of your workload. With auto-complete your career is guaranteed to end in the jiffiest of jiffies.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've gotten stuff from all sorts of folks - including the Times - because my gmail address is just may last name, and people seem to always forget to include the first letter of a first name, or they leave off stuff before a period: bob.smith@gmail.com or bsmith@gmail.com becomes smith@gmail.com.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
but I'm sure they can afford PGP/gnupg AND a highschool kid to show them how to use it.
but if I were running a major law firm that regularly handled confidential matters for multi-billion dollar clients ... I'd certainly encrypt the Hell out of every communication that left my offices. I mean, all they had to do was install some free (free!) encryption software like PGP, and there'd have been no problem.
Huh. I'll bet they will now.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Zyprexa
I was on this terrible crap for a while...after 2 weeks I had gained 15 pounds (not exaggerating).
I remember finding myself on the candy Isle at the supermarket shoveling 12-packs of twix, snickers, and all kinds of other candy into my shopping cart...and I usually don't eat sweets.
These 'medications' are really horrible...it's sad that so many people believe schizophrenia is easily treated with them. Big pharma marketdroids are mostly to blame. In fact, after 6 months, 80% of the people on these medications quit (I suspect the other 20% are forced to take it by hospital staff)...they actually prefer being crazy (unable to work, take care of themselves, go to public places, etc.) rather than take them...the side-effects are that bad.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I telnet to port 25 and type my emails into the server by hand. If I screw up, I have to start over. You pine users have it easy.
As I tried to explain to one of the Three Letter Acronyms of our company this morning, "Auto-Complete" is not to blame. "Not Paying Attention" is to blame. If you can't be bothered to look at who you are sending stuff like this to, then please step back from the computer and have someone else handle complicated things like email for you.
Surely if you are doing billion dollar deals then you can afford to hire someone capable of working a keyboard without embarrassing him or herself.
The headline is misleading. Eli Lilly was going to pay the $1 billion anyway, regardless of who received the email. They simply didn't want anyone to know about that.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
Why was the reporter's email address already in the lawyer's address book? They should check his mail logs and see what else he send to that person before.
Trolling is a art,
Dudes, you should see the crazy shit I get.
Signed,
Pritchard Cheney
It's interesting how some people are suggesting using encryption. I wouldn't be surprised to see an email like this; "Dear Eli, attached is the encrypted document. Regards, Your laywer PS: the password is zomg!1billion"
Not very-- especially if the email disclaimer makes unilateral demands and you have no prior relationship with the sender. On the other hand, if you previously agree to have a confidential discussion, and then break that agreement, the disclaimer might be enforcable. There's a site here:
...with more detailed analysis of this.
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
If these guys would use PGP or some other form of encryption, then even if you did send something critical like that to the wrong address, it wouldn't be so devastating. The technology to protect email has been around for nearly twenty years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But schizoaffective disorder is a devastating illness: it's just like being manic-depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. The risperdal I took previously for my psychotic symptoms wasn't working anymore. From 2003 through 2007, I was in the emergency room five times for psychiatric reasons, culminating in an ambulance ride to the mental ward, where I stayed for three weeks.
The Zyprexa completely eliminates the paranoia and visual hallucinations I would otherwise have almost all the time. It also brought me down from the bipolar mania that led to my ambulance ride, and prevents me from getting manic anymore.
As a result of taking it, I am able to hold a steady job - and a good one - as a software engineer, to provide for my wife and to pay her University tuition.
I've heard rumours that Zyprexa might be withdrawn from the market. I really hope that doesn't happen, as I've never had a medicine work so well.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
In the opinion of several lawyer friends I've asked about this one, that's wrong, too. Oh, and I mean factually, not ethically. It sounds like there is at least some credibility in some jurisdictions if you have a notice *before* the rest of the content, but all these corporate types appending legalese essays to the end of every outgoing message are just jumping on a bandwagon with no wheels.
No, I'm not going to tell you who my lawyer friends are or the jurisdictions in which they practise. Yes, if you take anything you read on Slashdot as legal advice, you're a fool. No, I am not a lawyer myself.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Some guy bought a motion-sensitive webcam, pointed it out his window, and set it up to email him whenever it took a picture.
Except he misspelled his own email address, and the images started coming to me, a complete stranger.
I stitched all the shots together into this time-lapsed movie:
http://knodi.com/images/floral_park/time_lapse.gif
Austin is more fun than Dallas.
Push the delete key.
(I'm not kidding. You start typing the name, watch it pop-up, keyboard cursor up/down to highlight the offending entry, push the delete key.)
The thing to vitally remember with Outlook is that the Autocomplete is based on the *nickname* list (NK2 file) which has absoultely NOTHING to do with your contacts list, global address list or address book contents (this is why you can have addresses in autocomplete that aren't in your contacts list and vice versa. It also autocompletes to how you type them in - if you type in someone's name instead of their SAM account name.)
Deleting entries as I described is the only officially supported way of editing the NK2 file. There is at least one third party program that tries to edit it, and you can, of course, delete the file and empty the whole list. It's somewhere in the Application Data directory of your profile.
That pretty much assumes that the encryption is done out of band. Personally, most usable variants of email encryption are handled by the client itself (at least as an initiant). At some point, when you select "Jim Smith" as the intended recipient, you have to expect that it will be delivered to "Jim Smith" in a format that he can open, regardless of any interim encryption. This might involve encoding it with his public key, but that wouldn't help the fact that you meant to send it to "Jan Smythe" now would it?
Any more intrusive method just wouldn't be used in the real world, since the hugely vast majority of all emails are actually intended to be read by the person that the author listed in the "To:" field. Any kind of catch-all solution smacks of vistaNag.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -Scott McNealy
This is exactly why Scott's idea isn't entirely a bad thing. The fact is, there is a certain amount of parity.
You and I don't necessarily have privacy from Eli Lilly Corporation should it try to profile things about us in order to make up a more compelling lie to get us to try its products.
But, much to its surprise, Lilly doesn't have privacy either as it tries to negotiate an enormous payoff to the government to escape the consequences of one of its screw-ups.
The dystopia is clearly the idea that consumers and citizens are helpless pawns of the big corporations who can skilfully control outcomes to be anything they want, by controlling their messages and carefully monitoring what people are thinking. They'd get away with murder, because they could always tell what's going to be deemed acceptable and what has to be covered up.
The reality and the counterbalance is: it will always be possible to catch information that's off-message when it slips through holes like this one, and that opens up the controlling corporation to the force of public opinion.
They don't have privacy either. If they insist on being monsters- opportunities will arise to bring that to light.
Keep the parity. Make sure these entities remain vulnerable to mistakes of this nature. If they arranged it so that if you publicised the leak you were sent to Guatanamo Bay, it would be quite the chilling effect- you've got to protect freedom of speech w.r.t. stuff that's accidentally leaked. The burden of self-protection has to stay on the company's side, they can't make it your responsibility to not reveal their shattering secrets when you're not actually part of their organization, or might actually be their enemy.
First of all, if we got rid of all the lawyers, this would have never happened. As far as the disclaimers go, what if I acted on the contents of the email before got the bottom of the message? The disclaimers are always at the bottom of the message, perhaps scrolled off the screen where I couldn't see it yet. Couldn't I claim I never read the disclaimer?
"Some online observers are speculating that auto-complete is to blame" How about blaming the fucking moron that sent it to the wrong person.
Posting without a Karma bonus because I just want to make sure that this poster understands the situation:
Yes, that's right, it absolutely won't have an effect on negotiations. That was the point of the post, to assure you that as a matter of law, their bargaining position hasn't been compromised at all because the settlement information can't come in at trial anyway (and the strength of each side's case are the bargaining chips in negotiations, not some dollar amount that the press accidentally found out.) Generally, any information obtained during negotiations, or even in this case--the incredibly boring revelation that negotiations took place--cannot come in as evidence at trial. This is an well-known evidentiary rule, and the point of it is that there is a strong public policy concern for encouraging settlements between parties, so as to not needlessly burden the judicial system. And the best way to encourage settlements is to make sure that the parties can be as candid with each other during negotiations as possible without having to worry that what they say can be used against them at trial. Both parties are free to continue negotiating. No harm, no foul.
That's why the information revealed in this leak doesn't matter, and why the focus of the story is on the far more interesting [i]way[/i] it was leaked. The prosecution cannot utter a word about this at trial, regardless of what the press knows or doesn't know. Eli Lilly is still in great shape, they just might want to consider getting different counsel! Was this an embarrassing screwup by the lawyer? Absolutely. Will it have any kind of extrinsic effect, like causing a dip in stock prices? [i]Maybe[/i]. But will it matter in a potential trial, and therefore prove damaging to Lilly's position during during negotiations? Absolutely not.
I was the campus token conservative columnist. He was very flamboyantly gay. Our university email addresses were generated off of initials plus, since we had a catastrophic hash collision, one distinguishing digit which people botched quite frequently. He got my death threats, I got his love letters, and neither of us was very happy with the matter.
... [Ed: I think it is for you]
... you [Ed: I think this one is for you] ... you [Ed: No, read it more carefully] ... you [Ed: Ah, whoops, my apologies] ... you [Ed: No problem. Hey, FWIW, I think he was out of line]
We both maintained a pretty good sense of humor about it, though. These were typical, with the vile language excised:
FWD: You fascist
FWD: I want to
RE: FWD: I want to
RE: RE: FWD: I want to
RE: RE: RE: FWD: I want to
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Thanks for that comment. With all the Tom Cruises of the world, crackpots, and media hysterics about 'psych drugs', you can't hear enough from the 'silent majority'. That is, the people who actually have mental disorders, and who've experienced an increased quality of life due to proper medication.
Personally, I could almost say that Zyprexa saved my life. It did play a part. Last year, I was suffering from a clinical depression, which progressed into a psychotic depression. I was locked in the clutches of depression while getting more and more paranoid and delusional. Luckily enough I didn't progress to outright hallucinations, although my perception of reality was certainly distorted.
If nothing had been done, I would be dead now. It was only a matter of time before I'd have taken my own life.
Luckily, I got help. Spent two weeks in the hospital, being given Zyprexa and Atarax, the former as an antipsychotic, the latter as an antidepressant. After two weeks (when the antidepressants had kicked in) I was released, and continued with them for six months. Today, I'm competely back to normal.
Now, I can't really compare Zyprexa to other drugs; this is the only time I've had such an episode, and hopefully never again. But I can say that the drugs DO work. And work well.
And I'll also say that I've got no history of any mental disorders (or in my family). Most people consider me to be a very stable person, mentally and emotionally. Point is, while we don't all have the misfortune of having a chronic disorder, a psychotic episode can literally happen to anyone.
Actually, they are absolutely watertight. Nothing you can do if you get one of those.
--
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