31–40 of 238 posts
Nixon 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?
Nixon 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?
Nixon 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?
Different context but Buffett's quote “If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you’re going to get a ticket,” applies here. If you are a criminal you don't violate only one law. You tend to violate multiple laws and at some point you are going to be sloppy.
Semi-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 I made a small b…
On a Mac I think printing to the built in PDF saver might work?
Another example: I seem to recall a case awhile back where Word change-tracking contained sensitive information even though “the document” didn’t seem to.
Sadly it used to be easy to rely on plain text implicitly but then we made Unicode so complicated that you have to be careful there too. Fingerprinting through zero-width sequences, etc. is essentially unnoticeable if you do not actively look for it.
Nixon 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?
There 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody's stupid sometimes, and it only takes once to do you in.
Mostly true. Hans Reiser and Ross Ulbricht were smart folks who got caught nonetheless. But not always true. No one's figured out Satoshi Nakamoto yet.
All 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody's stupid sometimes, and it only takes once to do you in.
Mostly true. Hans Reiser and Ross Ulbricht were smart folks who got caught nonetheless. But not always true. No one's figured out Satoshi Nakamoto yet.