This post was very amusing! It always bordered on silly meme-style writing, but never doing too much of it at once which I find annoying. The story itself was also very interesting!
When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
121–130 of 354 posts
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#122I feel like this buries the lede massively: Qantas' system was run by Amadeus, who also run the booking system for some 200 other airlines [0]. If you could do this with Qantas and get all those notes, you could probably do it to any other airline and get them too. That would be bad enough, but it also appears that this issue (or one very much like it) has been reported widely at least back in early 2019. So, either…
The underlying issues have been known for quite a while. There was a fantastic talk in CCC at 2016 about the airline booking systems and the various bits of information you can glean from them.[0]
0: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and if it is a PDF, convert to an image afterwards because too many PDF editors use non-destructive operations to add a new object instead of changing what's underneath. You'd be surprised at how many times this happens on Government documents with redaction. :S
That's why some even departments now have policies of printing and re-scanning retracted documents. It is dumb, but yet pretty hard to get wrong. Both MS Word and PDF have leaked redacted/removed information in the past. Wasting paper given the severity of some of these leaks is minimal cost.
If it is hard to get wrong, is it still dumb? Being able to verify with your own eyes that the redacted parts are indeed redacted is a pretty strong benefit to that process. You'll need to train staff to properly black out stuff (no idea what they do, heavy cardboard cut-outs or cutting out the censored content and using a black background for the scan?), but once that process is in place, it works.
With software you either need vetted and approved, very expensive software, or you have to accept a much higher error rate, because the operator cannot verify the results of the process with certainty.
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#124I don’t know if it’s just me or it’s the fact that I’m reading this on mobile on a small screen but I couldn’t stand the writing style. Curious to know if anyone else felt that way.
Feels like I accidentally opened discord
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#125I love Alex's stuff.
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#126> “You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!” I mean not to call him out but this did happen and he didn't navigate his way out (although that says nothing about his confidence). https://www.smh.com.au/national/tony-abbott-lost-in-the-outb... EDIT: To be fair, it's been a decade. Maybe h…
Sure, this is the guy who knighted a prince and ate a raw onion. What did you expect? Abbott was Australia's Trump. Thankfully he lasted in office an even shorter time than the people he replaced.
Since hired as a UK trade advisor:
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#127That was extremely entertaining and so much fun to read, thanks!
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#128I don’t know if it’s just me or it’s the fact that I’m reading this on mobile on a small screen but I couldn’t stand the writing style. Curious to know if anyone else felt that way.
I couldn't either. It was absolutely terrible. I think you can achieve the style and voice he was going for without being completely over the top, which he very much was.
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#129>I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring
This can be reversed as well, if you do black things out this way: please make sure you're using 100% opacity black. I've managed to retrieve data from plenty "blacked-out" documents simply by playing with contrast and exposure filters in Photoshop because the opacity wasn't set correctly.
Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
#130Nice. Here's a similar personal story with a PSA that sometimes blurring is NOT sufficient. A friend of mine posted on Instagram a picture of a U.S. visa (or something similar; it was probably five years ago) to announce her trip to the U.S., and she took care to blur out sensitive information such as her passport number. But a Gaussian blur is easy to reverse and I successfully unblurred it and told her my discovery…
Your advice is good, and I agree that you didn't use specialized software to reverse the blur, but this > I didn't use any specialized software; it was just Mathematica with its built-in ImageDeconvolve function with guessed parameters for the Gaussian kernel. is one of the most HN comments I've come across recently :)
Reminds me of the Simpson's 3D episode. Professor Frink's
>"Well, it should be obvious to even the most dimwitted individual, who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology..."