Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
And the culprit is (most likely).... timecop. Smart enough to post AC, dumb enough to leave his user name in the url :p