731–740 of 810 posts
Redacting documents is hard for people who didn't learn how to properly do it, and don't have the right tools. But for courts, the FBI or the DOJ this shouldn't apply. They know how to do it right.
I can only imagine, that some people didn't redact the documents properly on purpose. Plausible deniability.
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We have 30 years direct evidence that the users would ignore that warning, complain about the computer warning them too much, insist that the warning is entirely unnecessary, and then release a document with important information unredacted. The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on. They don't think of a PDF as a set of rendering instructions that can…
The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on Sorry, but a professional user not having an operational understanding of the tools they're working with is called culpable negligence in any other profession. A home user not knowing how MS Word works is fine, but we're talking desk clerks whose primary task is document management, and lawyers who were explicit…
Have you ever had to actually react a document in acrobat pro? It's way more fiddly and easy to screw up than one would expect. Im not saying professionals shouldn't learn how to use their tools, but the UI in acrobat is so incredibly poor that I completely understand when reaction gers screwed up. Up thread there's an in complete but very extensive list of this exact thing happening over and over. Clearly there's a tools problem here. Actual life-critical systems aren't developed this way, if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot. Boeing tried to do that with the max, but they weren't able to successfully convince the industry that that was OK.
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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…
It often comes down to not using the right software and training issues. They have to use Acrobat, which has a redaction tool. This is expensive so some places cheap out on other tools that don’t have a real redaction feature. They highlight with black and think it does the same thing whereas the redaction tool completely removes the content and any associated metadata from the document. This was basically the only r…
Unfortunately the E in DOGE should have been for Effectiveness. That is, is the system shooting at the right target, and how close is it to hitting that target.
You can be very efficient but if you’re doing the wrong thing(s) you’re ultimately wasting resources.
The irony is, DOGE got the E wrong. It’s efficient but not effective
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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…
It often comes down to not using the right software and training issues. They have to use Acrobat, which has a redaction tool. This is expensive so some places cheap out on other tools that don’t have a real redaction feature. They highlight with black and think it does the same thing whereas the redaction tool completely removes the content and any associated metadata from the document. This was basically the only r…
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Can you rephrase what I said without "literally using NATO for a grouping that does not include the US"? I didn't even mention the US lol, I think you're paranoid but please, correct me ... I mean, I didn't phrase it as Trump being a part of NATO, but he's not actually a country.
Oops I guess if this is as much sense as you can make then there wasn't much point in my trying to parse your comment in the first place.
I waffled a bit in my reply to not rub it in too hard.
And do you want to contribute with something other than nitpick or insult?
Do YOU think that an informed and intelligent person can conclude that Trump is secretly a Russian agent, given he was the driving force behind a massive hike in NATO spending (which Putin really hates)?
I'm not calling Trump competent, or consistent, or benevolent. You can say he has a weird crushed on Putin and is easily manipulated and corrupt.
You can even suggest a lot of the MAGA people who surround Trump are actually working for Russia, since Russia tries to influence a lot of groups and Trump's cronies (and the influencers Trump listens to) are often compromised.
But do you think Trump is actually consistently taking orders from Putin because of some kind of leverage Putin has? Because people say this constantly and it's (in my opinion) almost as embarrassing as Republicans and the Pizza conspiracy. Trump has done some things that are increadibly damaging to Russia, and blackmail doesn't work on a pathological liar with no sense of shame.
I'm sure you're smart enough to agree with pretty much all of this. But you disingenuously attack me because I'm attacking people who are on your side, even if you would privately admit they are dumb.
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Not sure what you mean by destructive replacement, since nothing is destroyed. So I just looked into this, and it's specifically Mixed Raster Content pipeline (ISO/IEC 16485) used in lots of different scanners. There's no need to find which specific software generated it because it's used by lots of them. It's a technique used to attempt to isolate font characters of the same size and style as separate layers before…
So this program really doesn't keep the original image of the document as a raster layer? That's kind of surprising, especially if it's used in the legal world. Personally, I'd always want to be able to recover the original document from the OCR layers. Or, are you saying you can? Then you should tell snopes, because it'll make the snopes article a lot shorter if they can just lead with that.
Scan (600 dpi) > MRC (600 dpi) > OCR (600 dpi) > Downsample (150 dpi) > Save to PDF (150 dpi)
The image is saved in raster format at 150 dpi. That's the document, but not at the original scanning resolution. If you performed MRC and OCR at the 150 dpi level, you'd get different/worse results than were originally gotten at 600 dpi. Which is why you always OCR before downsampling, and you downsample for smaller files.
This isn't changing anything about the Snopes article. It just explains why if you run MRC/OCR at the PDF resolution, you won't deterministically reproduce it because it's not the resolution it was originally run at.
You do understand that this OCR is only for being able to search and highlight text? It's not changing what's displayed. That's still the pixels.
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Are you trying to suggest that indicated it was fraudulent? That has very much been debunked -- it's just an artifact of OCR and compression, something that many scanners do automatically [1]. You can still open it with Illustrator if you want to see: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss... [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birth-certificate/
Yes, signed by “U.K.L. Lee” himself. Did you actually look at it? These FBI goombas aren’t even trying.
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It often comes down to not using the right software and training issues. They have to use Acrobat, which has a redaction tool. This is expensive so some places cheap out on other tools that don’t have a real redaction feature. They highlight with black and think it does the same thing whereas the redaction tool completely removes the content and any associated metadata from the document. This was basically the only r…
Are you saying that only Adobe PDF has proper redaction tools? I did a quick search and found several open source PDF tools claiming to do redaction- are they all faulty? I would honestly be surprised if there aren't any free tools that do it right.
Properly implementing redaction is a complicated task. The redaction can be applied to text, so the software needs to find out which text is covered by the rectangle and remove it. The redaction can be applied to images, so the software needs to edit a dizzying array of image formats supported by PDF (including some formats frequently used by PDFs but used basically nowhere else, like JBIG2). The redaction can be applied to invisible text (such as OCR text of a scanned document). The redaction can be applied to vector shapes, so some moderately complicated geometry calculations are needed to break the vector shapes and partially delete them.
It's very easy to imagine having a basic PDF editor that does not have a redaction feature because implementing the feature is hard.
For the same reason, a basic PDF editor does not have a real crop feature. Such an editor adds a cropbox and keeps all the content outside the cropbox.
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Tell us more about the sane (“common sense”?) gun laws! I love these.
I could cut-n-paste a bunch of them and you could copy back all the arguments against them, if you want to do that. Or post a link to a tiresome comment sections where it's been done countless times. But until 2A is amended there's nothing we can do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
That’s why I love the conversations.