When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number • Hacker News Board

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#261

Post by plorg » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #26

Nice. 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…

"I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring, 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."

I have this at work, with engineering drawings. With mobile equipment often were not dealing with engineering companies per se, and they won't or don't know how to get us CAD models of their equipment. And we often don't have the equipment on have at the time we need to make drawings.

But if you have a PDF with vector drawings, often a manual, and one or two good dimensions you can make a reasonably accurate model. AutoCAD even makes this easy with the PDFIMPORT function.

More often than I would expect, there's a whole other drawing view either covered by a white box or off-page. Once it looked like it had been drawn over with a white paintbrush tool, and if course the path of that too was also visible.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#262

Post by leokennis » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

brobdingnagians wrote: post #175

sellyme wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top solution on this Code Golf question is possibly the most comical example of Mathematica's scope that I've ever seen: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/71631/upgoat-or...

The other answers are also very clever and interesting. There are quite a few ways to determine whether the goat is up or down, and some are very simple.

The one that used reverse image search on Bing is so deliciously relatable.

On the one hand, it's perfectly built to spec and satisfied all requirements given by the customer.

On the other hand, you know it's incredibly fragile, and that the customer actually wants something different.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#263

Post by ChrisRR » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #200

ChrisRR wrote: post #191

That's a long read, has anyone got a blurb so I know what I'm getting myself into?

Search for "tl; dr". It's a section at the end of the page with the summary.

Thanks

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#264

Post by pietroppeter » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

is there a book about basics of IT?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492554

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#265

Post by dependenttypes » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

Is the passport number supposed to be secret? You show them when you buy alcohol in some countries as well to the police if they ask for it - all of these people can copy the number if they so wish.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#266

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

Jugurtha wrote: post #242

jacquesm wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thank you for the link. I had a hunch this should be possible but I wasn't aware that it was already proven. I used a similar trick on image recognition: turn images into a single 32 bit word by heavy pixelation and then look up a matching description. It's interesting how often that will work once you feed it with enough data. After all, that gives you 4 billion inputs mapped onto 4 billion descriptions…

I wonder if you could use adaptive optimal kernels, AOK[0]? I had used this for work on multiphase flow recognition from an electrical capacitance tomography, ECT, as a proxy for void fraction. We wanted to tinker with time-frequency representations. [0]: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/20c2/b82eef0809df80a402f125...

> electrical capacitance tomography

Mind blown. Wow, that is very impressive.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#267

Post by giarc » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

warent wrote: post #190

POiNTx wrote: post #20

Apart from the really interesting content, this is an extremely good read, strikes me as the right kind of balance of information and keeping you entertained. I really enjoyed this writing style!

Interesting, I liked the story but got the opposite impression you did. At first the humor was amusing but I felt like the relentless, extremely heavy sarcasm dripping off every sentence quickly turned it into a slog and even started to make me wonder which parts were genuine vs. joking. Not great.

I agree... when you listen to a great comedian, it's not 1 joke/sentence. This article was too much. I still read it all since the overall topic was entertaining but the attempt at humour was overkill.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#268

Post by moftz » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

Freak_NL wrote: post #123

Someone1234 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FOIA reports usually have a small textbox over the redacted information with a reference to the reason for redaction, likely made in Adobe PDF. Then the docs are either printed and scanned or just converted to an image only PDF.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#269

Post by chriswwweb » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

POiNTx wrote: post #20

Apart from the really interesting content, this is an extremely good read, strikes me as the right kind of balance of information and keeping you entertained. I really enjoyed this writing style!

I liked the humor in this piece a lot, I would not have read it until the end if it wasn't for the funny bits

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#270

Post by frosted-flakes » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

Proziam wrote: post #115

mhh__ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit like point and speak checklists on aircraft - it takes a certain amount of energy to do so you can't skip it without doing it deliberately

The Japanese train system utilizes similar concepts IIRC. When I first read about this I was astonished about how effective it was [0](up to 85% error reductions)! [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18952193

Toronto and New York City use a similar point-only system on its subway systems. Without the white gloves though.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-autom...