571–580 of 810 posts
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Not the only thing hack means now, or the most common usage anymore. See "life hack" - it means unexpected technique.
But this isn’t an unexpected technique it’s literally the core design of the pdf format. It’s a layered format that preserves the layers on any machine. Adobe has a redaction feature to overcome the default behavior that each layer can be accessed even if there is a top layer in front.
Befuddling that this happened again. It’s not the first time - Paul Manafort court filing (U.S., 2019) Manafort’s lawyers filed a PDF where the “redacted” parts were basically black highlighting/boxes over live text. Reporters could recover the hidden text (e.g., via copy/paste). - TSA “Standard Operating Procedures” manual (U.S., 2009) A publicly posted TSA screening document used black rectangles that did not remov…
I want to believe this is malicious compliance.
They fired/drove away/reassigned most of those who are competent in the executive branch generally, it is pretty easy to believe that none of those managing the document release and few of those working on it are actually experienced or skilled in how you do omissions in a document release correctly. Those people are gone.
Befuddling that this happened again. It’s not the first time - Paul Manafort court filing (U.S., 2019) Manafort’s lawyers filed a PDF where the “redacted” parts were basically black highlighting/boxes over live text. Reporters could recover the hidden text (e.g., via copy/paste). - TSA “Standard Operating Procedures” manual (U.S., 2009) A publicly posted TSA screening document used black rectangles that did not remov…
Never trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker. I've seen lawyers at major, high-priced law firms make this same mistake. Once it was a huge list of individuals names and bank account balances. Fortunately I was able to intervene just before the uploaded documents were made public. Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear teleme…
I love how every single comment here is litigating whether or not this qualifies “hacking” (yes I know obviously it does not) so I can’t really find any discussion on the contents lol
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The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the…
The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.
A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…
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I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here. It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this… You can find out the technical details in one quick search. How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age. It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way. They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs. Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not e…
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> Had exactly did Barr and Co. accomplish in terms of moving forward the agenda people voted for? These guys were so eager to win accolades from liberals they couldn’t even pick the lowest hanging fruit. Are you talking about the same Bill Barr? "Eager to win accolades from liberals" is a hilariously Trump-after-he-fired-someone thing to say. Have you read his Wikipedia page? Do you know who he actually is?
Obama's DOJ did stuff like go after Catholic nuns to make them offer birth control, to vindicate liberal principles like supremacy of secular values over religious values. Guys like Barr never did anything like that. Trump and his merry band of chuckleheads have achieved more legal wins for conservatism in a year than anyone in the Bush administration did in eight years.
[1] It's not necessarily apparent from the outside where those lines are drawn. Bush's $8 trillion effort to blow up the Middle East was far less controversial among D.C. lawyers than Trump's effort to restrict immigration from the Middle East. Liberal universalists agreed with Bush's fundamental premise, if not his approach. Both believed that Iraq was the way it is due to external factors like Saddam, not internal factors like Iraqi culture. Even if liberals thought it was a terrible idea to go to war to topple Saddam, they didn't disagree with the core premise that Saddam was the barrier to Iraq becoming just like Iowa.
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> To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic. I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.
So I don't know your specialty, but I'm going to make a wild guess and assume that it isn't stage magic. State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal. To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious. To the general public… a significant percent…
There are undoubtedly some people who would be fooled by this, but you don’t have to be technical in order to not be one of them.
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Redactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing). It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs. And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't releas…
The goal (at least it appears this way to me) is less about having any sort of airtight defense or actually successfully protecting people in the docs so much as giving plausible deniability for the talking heads that support the administration to push as truth. If it’s murky, sloppy, or otherwise unclear, then “no one wins” and “no one is right,” so the event can be easily dismissed. You can open up any popular cons…
It's clear from early on when they just re-released the same already public docs that the Trump admin thought "Ok, this is over, we can just move on now". But that basically backfired, especially because the expectation from conspiracy theorists was that every single democrat would be implicated. When nothing new came out it drove for more questions and kept this alive as an issue.
Now, I think they are continuing a bungled approach. These partial releases with aggressive redactions are only serving to keep the story alive. Ironically, if they'd complied with the law I could totally see the "this is a nothing burger" defense being something they'd pull off. But now with the seemingly daily revelations of "oh wow, Epstein was friends with famed abuser Nadler! And he said that Trump shared a taste in women!"
These sorts of revelations really mostly only work because they are tied to being "new information just released".
This also puts all conservative media on a backfoot. It's very hard for them to craft any sort of good narrative when every other day we are seeing wild and unexpected things like "Trump may have participated in murdering a baby".