Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
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Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#2This is sort of an aside to the article; but it boggles my mind how many people in the business world view PDF's as secure, unalterable documents.
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#3We all leave huge incriminating paper trails to some extent. This is why privacy is so important, because we’re all committing crimes in theory. That being said Manafort looks very very guilty and his crimes, which are financially based, I think are even more reprehensible in this era of global austerity and low economic growth.
Back to the privacy point, we are currently going through NIST 800-53 at work. We only need 800-171 but we thought the 800-53 standard would make us a better organization. So many things I didn’t think of. Do you have a micro-cut shredder first of all? Those Enron-esque cross-cut shredders don’t cut it anymore with open source machine learning that can easily reassemble those documents. Also, do you have an access code for your printer so the document only prints when he/she is up there, and doesn’t get left throughout the day in the tray for prying eyes? Also are your servers currently sitting in inventory up high on the shelves in case water gets into the building? So many things...
AmazonBasics 12-Sheet High-Security Micro-Cut Paper, CD, and Credit Card Shredder with Pullout Basket https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D7H8XB6/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_zCfK...
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#4Nixon was caught because he taped himself obstructing justice. Manafort was caught because he emailed incriminating documents in the clear. How the hell are we going to catch criminals who somehow avoid doing monumentally stupid things?
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#5There are certain things I cannot believe are still this difficult with as advanced as user-friendly technology is: sending files to someone else, and converting documents.
Sending files to someone else is a problem with a ton of solutions, some of them better than others, but none of them actually solving the problem. Email often has size limits and spam filters block certain attachments. Dropbox is often restricted at most workplaces, and not everyone uses it. It also has size restrictions. USB is the most reliable, but then you get into the whole "it's NTFS formatted which doesn't work on my Linux machine" or it's HFS and I need to use it on Windows" nonsense, plus sending it longer distances takes days through the mail.
But converting documents... guys it's just electricity running through fancy sand. It shouldn't be that hard. I work on software where I'm often connected to a jump server without Office installed on it, and the software expects me to open a spreadsheet for troubleshooting. I was doing some audio recording recently and the hoops I had to jump through to save it as MP3 weren't insurmountable, but still pretty annoying.
And don't get me started on the Office 2003 spreadsheet that makes me boot up my Windows XP VM to open because the macros won't work on Office 2017. Or when I need to use Visio but there's no Mac version so I have to open my VM too.
And the web just makes it worse... no more software incompatibilities because when software isn't supported anymore, we just shut the servers down and everything is gone forever.
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#6Maybe Gates had the conversion program installed and Manafort did not?
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#7All PDF to Word convertors I know are online services. Does that mean these people left copies of their documents on some servers? Those servers could also have timestamped logs of these people's access. If they were so careless with their own documents, if they altered more important ones, does that mean that there are now important documents stored somewhere in a random online pdf-word convertor?
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#8Semi-related tip: I despise protected pdfs with a passion. Especially when you download a datasheet and you can't add annotations or highlights to it. So, how to remove this protection? One way is to print to postscript and convert back to pdf, but then you can't copy text from it.
Here's how (on windows): download qpdf (http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/) and run
qpdf.exe -decrypt encrypted.pdf woho.pdf
# usage:
# decrypt.sh mypdf.pdf
# the decrypted file will be named mypdf.pdf, while the old encrypted is now mypdf.pdf-encrypted.pdf
#
echo pdf to de-secure: $1
read -n 1 -s -p "Press any key to continue"
mv "$1" "$1"-encrypted.pdf
qpdf.exe -decrypt "$1-encrypted.pdf" "$1"
echo encrypted file is now named: $1-encrypted.pdf
echo decrypted file is: $1Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#9Nixon was caught because he taped himself obstructing justice. Manafort was caught because he emailed incriminating documents in the clear. How the hell are we going to catch criminals who somehow avoid doing monumentally stupid things?
That's why white collar crime is so difficult to prosecute. And it's why prosecutor's rely so much on getting low level people to turn on high level people.
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#10We all leave huge incriminating paper trails to some extent. This is why privacy is so important, because we’re all committing crimes in theory. That being said Manafort looks very very guilty and his crimes, which are financially based, I think are even more reprehensible in this era of global austerity and low economic growth. Back to the privacy point, we are currently going through NIST 800-53 at work. We only ne…
Manaforts crimes are as bad as they are because he and his buddies were instrumental in destroying a country that was already fighting for its survival and many people have died and will continue to die as a result of this. If you compare the reaction to the VW scandal to what is happening here it is funny how the 'end result' is so much worse in the case of Manafort that it is a miracle he's just indicted for what are in essence financial issues.
The austerity and economic issues are very tiny part of the contrast here, the real damage is the instability in an already fragile region of the world and the machinations to act against the interests of almost all parties in the region except for the Russians.