121–130 of 810 posts
Its not a hack to copy and paste text that is part of the document data. The incompetence of the people responsible to comply with the law doesnt mean its reasonable to label something a hack. Please change the title.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I open your laptop and guess your password then that counts as hacking you in both legal and security terms You don't need to do some sophisticated thing for it to be considered hacking
If someone sends me a document with text in it that they meant to remove but didn't and then I read that text, I haven't hacked anything they're just incompetent. Hacking is unauthorised use of a system. Reading a document that was not adequately redacted can hardly be considered hacking.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at least a small handful of brain cells to rub together, so I know what the law _should_ say about this.
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…
"There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-sca…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?
what is the US exactly currently if not dictatorship? is there a single thing “President” cannot do right now and if so who would be stopping him? so perhaps on paper US is not dictatorship much like Russia and China are not… We spend decades trying to fight these regimes and lost so much that now we are worse than them :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?
The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition. If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
How it’s done from technical point?
PDF is less like an image, and more like a web page where elements can be stacked on top of each other. You can visually obscure things by sticking a black rectangle over the top, but anyone who inspects inside the pdf can remove it or see the text in the source. There would also be a mix of text documents, and image scans. The way to censor each is different. Perfectly censoring documents, particularly digital ones…
But the difficult part is easily repeatable once it's figured out, which is why it surprises me that it's not built into Acrobat as a tool already.
Its not a hack to copy and paste text that is part of the document data. The incompetence of the people responsible to comply with the law doesnt mean its reasonable to label something a hack. Please change the title.
How it’s done from technical point?
Layers. PDF is an absurdly complex file format. It's part of the reason there is no single "good" PDF reader, just a lot of mediocre PDF readers that are all terrible in their own way. Which is a topic for another day. There are several ways to remove data in a PDF: - Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but becau…
>- Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement. The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
You're making it sound way harder than it is, when both adobe acrobat and the built-in preview app on mac can both competently redact documents. I'm not aware of instances of either (or any other purpose-made redaction tools) failing. I wouldn't homebrew a python script to do my redaction either, but that doesn't mean doing redactions properly in some insurmountable task for some intern.
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…
"There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-sca…
This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with. Also, this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions. And it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision, but have to do the manual conversion step to printed position