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Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

theguardian.com

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Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#591

Post by tsunamifury »

p-e-w wrote: post #533
kiba wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic. Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".

> 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.

Please explain to me, in detail, without using an LLM how expert manifolds work.

I’m guessing to you, it is also black magic.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#592

Post by tsunamifury »

pwg wrote: post #511
sallveburrpi wrote: post #493

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.

Most journalists are ex. English majors (or some other non-technical degree). I would not expect any (even the supposed tech. journalists) to understand the technology they report upon to the level that us here on HN understand that same technology. Their job is to write coherent articles that gather views, not truly understand what it is they are writing about. That's why the Gell-Mann Amnesia [1] aspect so often cr…

I’m my experience most posters on HN are don’t under technology either. So they both don’t understand people or technology putting them two steps behind a journalist.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#593

Post by [deleted] »

supermatt wrote: post #253
eBombzor wrote: post #252

This site has really gone downhill lately with drivel like this being upvoted. Any real developers on this site anymore?

Regardless of the content itself, naive redaction of a high profile PDF still exposing the text contents is something that seems relevant to the community. Maybe you are in the wrong place?

[deleted]

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#594

Post by tsunamifury »

imiric wrote: post #311
agentifysh wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's absolutely bewildering how ridiculous everything has been so far in terms of competence and this really takes the cherry on the top near Christmas too. how much lower can they go ?!

I'm not too concerned about the US. They've made their bed. I'm more concerned with them dragging everyone else down, and someone much worse taking their place.

Pray tell what western country right now isn’t in the same position?

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#596

Post by IncreasePosts »

vincengomes wrote: post #134

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - Napoleon Bonaparte Let all the files get released first. Then show your hacks.

There's enough people who would do it for the clout and don't really care what is in the documents one way or the other.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#597

Post by bena »

rkagerer wrote: post #537
cmarschner wrote: post #14

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 think it's part laziness here.

Placing a black rectangle on a PDF is easier than modifying an image or removing text from that same PDF.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#598

Post by bena »

cmarschner wrote: post #294
heavyset_go wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe this is malicious compliance.

Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence

I think it's more that the analogy is broken.

If I have a sheet of paper and I color a section black. That's it. It's black. No going back.

So I can see people thinking the same for PDFs. I drew the black box. It's black. Done. They don't realize they aren't dealing with a 2D sheet of paper, but with effectively a 3D stack of papers. That they didn't draw a black box on the page, they drew a black box above the page over the area they wanted to obscure.

The fact that this happens a lot is an indication that the software is wrong in this case. It doesn't conform to user expectations.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#599

Post by pessimizer »

beasthacker wrote: post #521

The U.S. federal government is bad at redactions on purpose. The offices responsible for redactions are usually in-house legal shops (e.g., an Office of Chief Counsel inside an agency like CBP) and the agency’s FOIA office. They’re often doing redactions manually in Adobe, which is slow, tedious, and error-prone. Because the process is error prone, the federal government gets multiple layers of review, justified (as…

This is an extremely interesting perspective. I haven't really heard it before, but I once worked for the state in a technical capacity and watched as they spent entire workdays and scheduled multiple meetings with the sole purpose of figuring out ways to slow down or narrow FOIA requests.

I didn't really know how they slept at night, but I don't know how a lot of people sleep at night. I only had to be involved because I had to do the actual trawling through the emails. They spent their time trying to narrow the keywords that I'd have to search, and trying to figure out new definitions of the words "related to."

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#600

Post by andrewflnr »

vdupras wrote: post #464
andrewflnr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no patriotism here. That's just part of the cover for seeking power.

Who's seeking power, the poor schmuck who misused their PDF tools? It seems that my novel "razor" is misunderstood. The article attributes bad redacting to gross incompetence. But what if the person having done this bad redacting is instead doing sabotage with plausible deniability "lol, those damn PDF tools, you never know how they work"? It makes this story more interesting, and it allows one to see an outline of t…

I do think I misunderstood your post, sorry. I was thinking of those ordering the redaction.

I do still think incompetence is more likely to be the explanation. Incompetent redactions are a perennial problem even in much less controversial situations.

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