Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 238 posts

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#201

Post by cr0sh »

stcredzero wrote: post #64
logfromblammo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might also argue that if you notice the cop following you and continue driving another 490 miles, you will deserve that ticket. And maybe an award for fuel economy.

A friend of mine once spotted a policeman down the road, turning on his lights. Since he was on a limited-access highway, he decided to pull over very quickly and just wait the policeman out. (They were on opposite shoulders, and the left shoulder didn't extend back to where my friend was.) The policeman got out of his car and ordered him to proceed with hand gestures. My friend decided he could be in worse trouble i…

My story of weird police interaction:

My wife was driving my pickup on the freeway late at night; I'm in the passenger seat dozing, sleeping off a party we went to.

Anyhow, she's pulling over and I see the red and blues flashing around us, and I'm wondering what's going on. She's asking me where I keep my registration. We stop, and the cop stops behind us.

Then a second pulls in behind him. I'm sitting there wondering WTF because the worst thing I can think is wrong is a burned out tail light...

Cops come up on both sides; we roll down our windows, cops shine flashlights around within the vehicle - my head is pounding, thanks guy...

Cop asks my wife: "Why did you pull over?"

My wife replies: "Because you had your lights on, blipped the siren, and pulled us over...?"

Cop then says: "...Go on, get outta here."

We're both looking at each other like "WTF was that about?" - but my wife pulls out, gets up to speed, stays at the speed limit, then gets off at the nearest exit. We take surface streets home.

To this day, I have no idea what it was about.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#202

Post by stcredzero »

gamblor956 wrote: post #195
mwfunk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rant: I see this in the Bay Area all the time. On many freeways, the fast lane is also the carpool/HOV lane, at least during high-traffic times. The idea is that the government wants to encourage carpooling and/or low-emissions vehicles, therefore restricting the fast lane to such people would encourage such things. But I often see people get in the fast lane not because they want to go faster than the adjacent lane,…

Per the CHP, there is no concept of a "fast lane" or a "passing lane" on a freeway. While it is customary and polite for slower cars to drive on the right, they're not required to do so.

It varies from state to state. Some states prohibit passing on the right. Some don't. In Ohio in the late 90's, the law was that anything which you could drive on was a lane. I was slowing down in the right lane and signalling a right turn into a parking lot, right when the young lady behind me decided to drive over the empty parking spaces on the right-hand side and pass me. There was a fender-bender. The policeman summarily ruled it was my fault, because according to the law in Ohio, I was responsible for looking out for someone passing me in the "lane" comprised of the empty parking spaces. I think California Law is different, so people can have bike lanes.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#203

Post by mi100hael »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #108

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.

Not necessarily. There might not have been an obvious criminal action if Manafort just had someone else convert an existing P&L disclosure from PDF to Word. The real problem was asking someone to convert his fraudulent Word doc to PDF.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#204

Post by dvtv75 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #151
s73v3r_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully I haven't, but I fully believe that people can be dumb or dickish enough to do that.

Oh yes. * http://abc13.com/news/driver-explains-himself-after-dangerou... * http://www.northescambia.com/2017/08/driver-caught-on-camera... * The winner, though? A fully loaded semi: http://www.startribune.com/trucker-charged-over-roaring-by-s... "I gotta be places". Or, less politely, "Fuck you, I got mine."

My favorite sentence was this:

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/11/cleveland_w...

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#205

Post by fencepost »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #156
fencepost wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You beat me to it. HN readers who don't work with non-technical users may not realize just how lost and unable to explore many people are, particularly when they didn't grow up with computers. There's also a huge problem with "dialog blindness." If you have an understanding of how "computers" (hardware, OS, apps, websites, doesn't matter it's all the same mystery box) work then you can explore with less fear. I deal…

"Didn't grow up with computers" (have contact with computers during compulsory education) in the West is likely people over 50. Can probably go to 55-58 for people who have degrees; ie people who used computers during Uni education. If you're older you've probably had 20 years with computers in the workplace save for some niches, seems long enough to learn to use a simple point-click menu.

You're underestimating how much things have changed in the last 30-50 years. Manafort knows how to use common Office programs like Microsoft Word and Excel. There's a pretty good chance that he's even somewhat skilled (by his standards) with Excel or at least that he's experienced. He may have understood from reading about it in the past that document files can save a history of changes, and he knew to some extent the difference between a document and a PDF.

None of that means that he actually understands what is happening behind the scenes. Odds are good that his college exposure to computers was limited to Hollerith cards used for registration.

Put differently, Manafort is from the generation that indents in word processors by hitting space 4-5 times.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#206

Post by dreamcompiler »

mwfunk wrote: post #149
alphabettsy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People pass on the right because people block the passing lane. It shouldn’t be possible in most cases to pass on the right.

Rant: I see this in the Bay Area all the time. On many freeways, the fast lane is also the carpool/HOV lane, at least during high-traffic times. The idea is that the government wants to encourage carpooling and/or low-emissions vehicles, therefore restricting the fast lane to such people would encourage such things. But I often see people get in the fast lane not because they want to go faster than the adjacent lane,…

It's illegal in Colorado to use the left lane without passing. For a while, the cops were actually enforcing this and it was a joy to drive in Colorado. But for about the past year, the cops seem to have stopped enforcing it and the left lane hogs have returned.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#207

Post by m-p-3 »

herodotus wrote: post #176
freehunter wrote: post #5

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…

Actually, converting PDF to a file format is very non-trivial. The problem is that the PDF typically retains none of the semantic structure of the original file. Yes, I know there are converters to Word, none of which are perfect, but in each case the people who wrote the converters had to do a lot of work. PDF is all about geometry. So even the characters in a word do not have to be together in the PDF content strea…

I wish more PDF creation softwares would allow to embed the original document within, like how LibreOffice does it.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#208

Post by nugi »

cr0sh wrote: post #201
stcredzero wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine once spotted a policeman down the road, turning on his lights. Since he was on a limited-access highway, he decided to pull over very quickly and just wait the policeman out. (They were on opposite shoulders, and the left shoulder didn't extend back to where my friend was.) The policeman got out of his car and ordered him to proceed with hand gestures. My friend decided he could be in worse trouble i…

My story of weird police interaction: My wife was driving my pickup on the freeway late at night; I'm in the passenger seat dozing, sleeping off a party we went to. Anyhow, she's pulling over and I see the red and blues flashing around us, and I'm wondering what's going on. She's asking me where I keep my registration. We stop, and the cop stops behind us. Then a second pulls in behind him. I'm sitting there wonderin…

If I had to guess, driving slow. Her pulling over instead of speeding up was smart, but mildly suspicious to a cop without an active call.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#209

Post by refurb »

eyepulp wrote: post #146
Nokinside wrote: post #84

When I was involved with a contract negotiation, they emailed me a pdf offer with addresses, names and important numbers retracted with black and asked if these terms are OK with me and we can talk about the numbers. I noticed that when I select a region of text with a mouse, the retracted' black text becomes white text over black background. It revealed name of our competitor, addressees and numbers in their offer,…

I think you meant "redacted" vs "retracted". But yeah, there are a lot of stories out there of people assuming a black bar over black text is high security.

There was a document released by the State Dept at one point where the redactions were just black box over the text. You could just select, copy and paste to see it.

I compared documents and maybe not surprisingly, they seemed relatively minor points.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#210

Post by jermaustin1 »

thephyber wrote: post #164
jermaustin1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it hard to trust free. Even with T&Cs/ToS/Privacy, if I'm not paying for it, I feel that its all lies. Combine that with a site that looks like that, and I'm assuming my PDF will have a virus attached to it.

I don't pay anything to use HackerNews. How much do you pay?

That is a completely different beast. I was talking specifically about uploading and downloading files I intend to open.
Post reply on HN