Live data from Hacker News

Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

theguardian.com

661–670 of 810 posts

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#661

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

Actually there are two type of comments: "it's not hacking" and "it's malicious compliance". That makes of 90% of what's here, split about 50/50.

And now we have our third! A meta-analysis of the HN comment chain!

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#662
post #321

It's funny seeing this play out because in my personal life anytime I'm sharing a sensitive document where someone needs to see part of it but I don't want them to see the rest that's not relevant, I'll first block out/redact the text I don't want them to see (covering it, using a redacting highlighter thing, etc.), and then I'll screenshot the page and make that image a PDF. I always felt paranoid (without any real…

In practical terms, a more convenient way to achieve this is just printing the document to a PDF, which rasterises the visible layer into what the printer would see. Most pdf tools support this.

You can, but I don't trust software for these types of niche but critical tasks hah. Next thing I know I'd be reading a headline about how "bug in print to PDF actually retains XYZ metadata"

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf.... That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.

I hope you're not blaming the users. It's understandable they would be confused. The software needs to clarify it for the user. Perhaps, when you try to save it, it should warn you that it looks like you tried to redact text, and that text is still embedded in the document and could be extracted. And then direct you to more information on how to complete the redaction.

We have 30 years direct evidence that the users would ignore that warning, complain about the computer warning them too much, insist that the warning is entirely unnecessary, and then release a document with important information unredacted.

The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on. They don't think of a PDF as a set of rendering instructions that can overlap. They think it's paper. Because that's what it pretends to be.

The best fix for this in almost any organization is the one that untrained humans will understand: After you redact, you print out and scan back in. You have policy that for redacted documents, they must be scanned in of a physical paper.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#667

I swear the top comment on every popular post is always about semantics or nitpicking and is very rarely about anything in the article itself.

I noticed my most recent nitpick comment got a significant number of upvotes. I spent some time today wondering if HN needed a way to indicate something is a nitpick and cause the votes on it to carry less weight in the sorting. Because if the nitpick is valid I don't think downvotes are appropriate since people might end up seeing it and having misconceptions corrected, but it also shouldn't detract from discussions on the meat of the post.

Of course I'm probably the odd one out, wanting to apply that modifier to my own nitpick comments, so that idea probably wouldn't end up being very useful in general.

(There is also some irony in me commenting on your comment here where it's completely unrelated to the actual post...)

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, but the teeth of this act belong to some future justice department. I predict Trump will issue blanket pardons for everyone involved, up to Bondi; and that none of them will respect a congressional subpoena.

There's already bipartisan talk of inherent contempt being applied in the House, so the teeth might not wait for a future justice department.

The discharge petition to all the bill that forced this release was going nowhere until President Trump declared that he was onboard, and then it happened. Until then it was going nowhere.

My guess is that someone suggested to Trump that they could redact most of the bad bits and plausibly deny that they were doing that, and he decided that this was the path of least resistance.

So I don't think there is any chance that he will easily allow any more votes to go the way of putting more pressure. Unless the pressure gets so bad that he has no choice (read: Newsmax and FoxNews both start pressure campaigns).

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf.... That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.

I hope you're not blaming the users. It's understandable they would be confused. The software needs to clarify it for the user. Perhaps, when you try to save it, it should warn you that it looks like you tried to redact text, and that text is still embedded in the document and could be extracted. And then direct you to more information on how to complete the redaction.

The link in the comment you are replying to has a screenshot of exactly this. it’s a prompt with a checkbox asking you to delete the metadata and hidden info involved with the redaction. you’d have to blaze past that and not read it to make this mistake. It is user error.

I guess if you really want to defend users here you could say people are desensitized so much by popup spam that a popup prompt is gonna just be click through’d so fast the user probably barely recognizes it, but that’s not the software’s problem. For whatever reason some users would prefer to just put black boxes over obfuscated text, so here we are

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think you have an understanding of job specialization.

I know some journalists. They are smart people. However, they are not experts in math, science, or technology. They are experts in journalism. This wasn't any different at any time in the past.

Post reply on HN