131–140 of 238 posts
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…
Hilarious those journalists "I attempted to transform my Word draft of this blog post into a PDF. I confess that I did fumble a bit at first (it’s been a while), but I eventually managed to get the job done. According to my stopwatch, the full ordeal took me 42 seconds." When the real problem ws turning a PDF into Word.
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Haha.. I don't buy into it either. Something is fishy about the story, or maybe this is a secret plea deal with a behind the scenes type negotiation process to trick other conspirators into providing more evidence.
You don't buy that many people are quite bad with computers?
When you deal with Russians crooks and people in those circles, you tend to lower your guard. You think you will not get caught "because in Ukraine they had money in suitcases," or through a gazillion shell companies. The funny thing is that he might have just gotten away, if he wasn't involved in the Trump campaign. Call it greed or money mismanagement, but knowing when to quit may mean life or death (kinda)
For people thinking that he should have known better on a technical basis, maybe but remember that during the time in question he was a 64-68 year old man (= graduated college around the time Unix was being rewritten in C) who's never worked in a technical field. By the time most of these capabilities existed Manafort had been management/executive for years or decades. That's not to say that he couldn't have learned…
Not sending a written paper trail should be covered in Criminal Surivial Strategies 101. Whether it's telegraph, snail mail, email or WhatsApp, this is just sloppy criminal work. For example Steven Cohen avoided an insider trading conviction by making sure nothing bad ever had his name on it. If you needed to discuss something secret, you talked to him in person. Background: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/co…
The "e" in "e-mail" stands for "evidence." :)
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…
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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 a…
Yes I see what you mean, and wow thanks for putting his crimes in a broader context. It’s my hope that “financial crimes” are just going to be a convenient way to indict the many many people who have committed crimes like him. Back in 2016, a weird / interesting / pretty smart idea in Clinton’s platform was to help the US deficit by only enforcing current tax laws. Lol that’s all it was, enforcing the laws that were…
They often are. Despite the many actually heinous crimes he committed, Al Capone was ultimately nailed for tax evasion.
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Do you really need a technical background or some sort of college training to find the File > Save As > PDF option?
Haha.. I don't buy into it either. Something is fishy about the story, or maybe this is a secret plea deal with a behind the scenes type negotiation process to trick other conspirators into providing more evidence.
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Exactly. Conversion to PDF 'flattens' the document.
In what way do you mean flattened? Authorship and metadata? No, that is often still present, and many tools will include author and software data by default. Layers? No, PDFs can have extensive layers.
The document becomes uneditable by most commonly used PDF readers (Adobe Reader DC, web browsers, etc.). You can still edit it, but changing the actual content becomes substantially more difficult.
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…
When I want to "protect" a PDF, I print it as a TIFF and then PDF that document. It's less "protecting" than "making it difficult to alter or copy-paste from," but it works. (Also good for ensuring your redaction blobs can't be moved.)