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

mango.pdf.zone

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

#71

Post by coagmano »

boyter wrote: post #35
bmarquez wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it, is there something noteworthy about eating a raw onion?

Yes and no. It was the pinnacle in a series of bizzare behaviour from Tony while he was the Prime Minister. Certainly its the one people most remember of him. Keep in mind he ate it with the skin on as well. I think its also something people look out for, with the previous PM Kevin Rudd being somewhat infamous for eating his own ear wax on live TV. When I was working on an archive project for the ABC, "tony eating on…

The earwax thing was during a long boring session in parliament, so not exactly Live TV

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

#72

Post by jtchang »

sellyme wrote: post #66
mroche wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is one of the most HN comments I've come across recently :) That gave me a laugh. I don't have any experience with Mathematica, but everytime I see it mentioned (usually on HN) I'm amazed at the sheer breadth the system is capable of. The amount of use cases and possibilities blows my mind.

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...

That answer is absurd yet awe inspiring what Mathematica can do.

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

#74

Post by boyter »

JadeNB wrote: post #68
boyter wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. It was the pinnacle in a series of bizzare behaviour from Tony while he was the Prime Minister. Certainly its the one people most remember of him. Keep in mind he ate it with the skin on as well. I think its also something people look out for, with the previous PM Kevin Rudd being somewhat infamous for eating his own ear wax on live TV. When I was working on an archive project for the ABC, "tony eating on…

> I think its also something people look out for, with the previous PM Kevin Rudd being somewhat infamous for eating his own ear wax on live TV. … as a stunt? On a dare? Why ?

It was during a long question time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ipvdBnU8F8

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

#75

Post by exikyut »

powersnail wrote: post #63
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.

Why don't they convert the PDF to image and convert back? This approach seems to be a lot more efficient, and less prone to other type of human errors (e.g. missing page). Is there still an attack vector?

If you do that, look at the document, hit CTRL+Z, then look at the document again, it will likely look identical, thanks to the fact that rendering a PDF to a JPEG with 70-90% quality... at ~600DPI... then scaling it back out to a 75-150DPI screen... is going to look visually lossless.

So, not only do you have the energy-investment thing noted in the/a sibling comment, you have the issue that there's no giant "THIS IS AN IMAGE" or "THIS HAS TEXT IN IT" that you can just Look At and know that yeah the document is okay. There's no lowest-common-denominator provability thing. You have to hyperspecifically know what to look for (render to image) then know how to verify whether it's an image or not.

And... how do you verify if it's an image? I don't have any PDF authoring/editing software on this machine, so the only thing I can think of is checking the Undo menu for "convert to image" or similar.

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

#76

Post by mulmen »

stordoff wrote: post #33
Nextgrid wrote: post #4

I 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 found myself rolling my eyes a few times, but the core content was good so I didn't find it all that off-putting. "Update: I have been arrested." did leave me slightly confused for a while though, probably due to the verbosity making me want to scan read.

If you were scanning that would be an easy joke to miss. The giveaway is the previous paragraph ending mid-word like the authorities just busted in and hauled the author off to a CIA black site.

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

#77

Post by mulmen »

starpilot wrote: post #10
Nextgrid wrote: post #4

I 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.

Same. Sounds like the author thinks he's way funnier than he is.

I laughed out loud multiple times reading this and sent it to some friends whose senses of humor I respect and the consensus is this is funny.

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

#78

Post by exikyut »

SamBam wrote: post #36
anon9001 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was really a delight to read. I wonder if the author was raised on 2600. Fantastic stuff. Also visited his page. Does not disappoint: https://mango.pdf.zone/

Figured the least I could do after reading the article was crack the puzzle, and felt good that I did since I usually fail at these kinds of things.

Oh, that was indeed fun.

"Uhh... how many layers deep is this going to g-- oh, ok. Nice :D"

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

#79

Post by dheera »

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…

Yup. I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago in 2007, and it was republished in Gizmodo in 2014: https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-never-use-pixelation-to-h...

You can dictionary attack pixelated photos.

With Gaussian kernels, besides deconvolution you can sometimes also dictionary attack them if you have the original font and if the kernel is properly normalized kernel (i.e. most gaussian blurs).

Although I haven't tried, I think there may even be neural network based techniques that can perform even more effectively than a dictionary attack.

Separately, if the image editing tools added sufficient random noise to their mosaic filters they might be able to thwart most of these attacks, or at least make them significantly harder.

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

#80

Post by searchableguy »

bmarquez wrote: post #31
chris_wot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't get it, is there something noteworthy about eating a raw onion?

Yeah same. It's pretty common for restaurants and households to have raw onion in the salad (at least in north India). Unusual for someone to eat them with the skin though.
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