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More PDF Blackout Follies
georgewilliamherbert writes "The latest installment of "As the PDF Blackouts Turn" hit today, with a U.S. government apparently releasing a redacted version of their court filing in the Balco grand jury leak case
which merely stuck a black line over the text, which remains available in the document. As with prior documents, entering text cut/paste mode in a normal PDF browser such as Acrobat allows a reader to access the concealed text. Previous incidents include an AT&T filing in the NSA case." This works with Xpdf and KPDF, too; for KPDF, use the selection tool (under the Tools menu) around the redacted section, copy to clipboard, then paste into the text-manipulator of your choice.
Perhaps the people making these "blacked out documents" should be taught a little about Vector Graphics and that a black box is not the same as a sharpie. One word for them 'n00b'!!
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
we should all just write everything down in pencil. Boo to technology.
Or... they could just find a better technological solution. Seems like a no brainer to me.
(end of post)
Perhaps after another dozen or so incidents they'll decide a little training is appropriate for the folks who are doing the redacting.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
You would think that people would have learned after the first time around. Apparently not.
--
"And the geek shall inherit the earth."
with a U.S. government apparently releasing a redacted version of their court filing
Which U.S. government?
You can open them directly in Safari and cut/paste into TextEdit too.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
i keep an older version of adobe's acrobat reader for Linux version 5.0 and copy & paste in to a text editor works in it too...
i hate the new acrobat reader. some claim it calls home to the mothership(Adobe) which i dont approve of either (spyware)...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
What's this in TFA about Barry Bonds and steroids? I had no idea.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Redacting electronic documents right is HARD. See, for example, The NSA's guide to redacting word documents as PDF.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Coral cache of the PDF
Anyone into mirroring it?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This is pretty ridiculous. Products have existed for years to take care of this sort of thing, such as http://www.appligent.com/products/product_families /redaction.php.
How does this keep happening?
...before they are told to just take a print-screen of the document, page by page, then use a graphics program to install the black boxes over words, then import each image as a page into their PDF creator...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The document was edited (by the second definition you listed) to put a black bar over some text. What's wrong with that? Replace the word redacted with edited and it makes sense: "...U.S. government apparently releasing a redacted version of their court filing in the Balco grand jury leak case which merely stuck a black line over the text"
Shit... use the default pdf viewer in ubuntu evince 0.5.2
Just select the text and bang,.... there it is for reading.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Really nice to know that these folks has taken an apparent cue on safe and secure documents from the folks in Redmond.
On a serious note... this is seriously scary. Imagine if the NSA and other agencies are redacting all of their documents this way an passing them around the world to field offices, embassies and elsewhere.
Imagine the implications during legal proceedings here in the States. Yikes.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
A: There is magic marker ink all over the screen!
Unknown host pong.
And these are the people we are suppose to be entrusting our government too? I have never understood why people are so damn lazy that they can't do a little research into what they are doing. People juat want results, not knowlege about what they are doing.
/.) and just stupid things the legeslator has done. I would love to right a research report and send it to newspapers and my congressmen. I would even GNUFDL it so others could do the same...:-p (you know, since PD doens't exist, another thing....)
If you want my opinion (or even if you don't...:-p) this is the achelle's(sp) heel of our society today, most people are lazy bastards that just want to get done with somethign without learning anything about it. People just want to finish school to get a degree and do whatever. This is BS. That takes moeny from people like me who want a PhD (I'm an undergrad at the momenet) in a research science (bio, chem, and/or the computational varients of them), but can't get enough money to even pay tuition and buy the books I need. I would more than gladly work for the school to do it, but money is tight and work-study is hard to come by here.
Another thing that pisses me off is incopetence. This article is a good example. Getting a few days to a week of for St. Patriks day is another (who the hell gets of for St. Pat's day?). I wish I had the time to do an indepth study of stupid laws that take up time in congress. Stupid piggy basks attached to laws (one was mentioned yesterday on
So yeah, in conclusion, someone without computer experince was told to do somethign, did it without thinking or asking (my gf would at least ask if she has to do something she's unsure about, then it becomes the attoney's fault, not her's) someone else who should know more.
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
Leave PDF the way it is. In fact, make it really hard to actually redact something, but put a tool front-and-center that looks like its redacting something.
Then - remove any delete capability from Outlook. Trash is fine, but not delete.
Then - configure all Windows machines to be inherently wide open, so that we may all peer into gov't computers. Oh wait, this is already true.
Sometimes I think those in positions of high gov't power should forfeit practically all privacy for the duration of their term. Put a webcam on these fuckers 24/7. Does that sound... draconian? Unreasonable? Maybe. But after losing billions of dollars in things like Iraq military contract debacles, I don't trust any of these people. They certainly don't trust us.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Here's how the NSA recommends redacting files:
5 .PDF
http://www.nsa.gov/snac/vtechrep/I333-TR-015R-200
Is it just me or do they look a little pretensious?
"Snatching defeat from the mouth of victory on a daily basis."
Im reading the instructions and skimming through them and what do I see?? A bretheren of clippy. At one point it seems like she/he is writing down all the secrets. Either one of two things is going on. The document is a fake or I should join the government because they need all the help they could get.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Like .doc, .pdf, and AFAIK the opendoc format.
It's the same old story as with operating systems or anything else: features are usually either a plus or a "don't matter", except when serious security issues are involved, in which case you can't always predict what is benign, whether in and of itself or in combination with other features. Adobe tried to position PDF for all kinds of other things like portable forms and collaboration, but obviously their users are running into the same problems ad MS Word users have with leaking sensitive information.
What there should be is a standard document format for outside release of legal or sensitive documents, that doesn't have any features that could be inadvertantly used. Maybe it is RFT or a stripped down PDF; but something where you can tell the intern to release this press release, and not count on him being smart enough to check for hidden comments and workflow information. It sould be WYSIAYG -- what you see is ALL you get -- and any additional features, other than possibly a small and well defined set of metadata, should parse as an error.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You gotta give those poor cubicle folk some credit for trying ... at least they aren't putting Wite-Out on the screen, right?
Seriously though, if the government gets TOO embarrassed about this sort of thing, they'll do something even more stupid, and mandate all official documents to use some proprietary DRM/TPM/HDCP/BVD format that only Windows Vista can display.
Add a "redact" tool to the existing toolbar!
Why are we publicizing this flaw? We have a US Government in power that increasingly wants to peer into the lives of innocent citizens, while becoming less transparent itself in order to cover up deceit, fraud, abuse, and just plain bumbling incompetence. If these Keystone Kops want to believe that they are criminal masterminds, let them, but don't help them actually cover stuff up!
Read about "track changes" in Word - I've been given Word documents with the classified bits supposedly deleted; but flip the "track changes" drop-down to "original" and Presto! there it all is.
Posting anonymously for good reason....
Having worked for the gov't and knowing that some documents that I have signed and worked on should be redacted, this scares the crap out of me. It's not that I did anything that was illegal or "evil" as google would put it, I just don't want the "bad guys" (terrorists, etc.) knowing my name is attached to anything that resulted in their cohorts arrested or killed on the battlefield (also includes CONUS since 9/11).
Normal average government workers should NOT be redacting, the people who redact should be those who know that if they screw-up, they may be screwing themselves or good friends in the process. Have people do it(redact) who have something to lose.
Just my 2 cents.
"Security by obscurity" :)
This law would instruct the FCC to create a program to certify approved PDF viewers; such viewers must make it impossible for users to steal the redacted data in a file, along with technical measures to prevent tampering with the viewers by hackers. Certified viewers will be made available to the public by software companies on a list of government-approved PDF vendors. After it becomes illegal to own a non-certified pirate PDF viewer, these dangerous information leaks will thankfully become a thing of the past.
For lawyers/courts/etc., redacted (Per Black's Legal Dictionary) means:
The lesson here is this: if you see a word used in a legal context (or any professional context) and it sounds entirely wrong...ask yourself first whether it might have a special meaning before complaining.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Their use of redact is completely correct.
If I am releasing a document for publication and decide to remove information from it, this is redaction. It's editing for publication, which can include the removal of information. It could also include the addition of new information, but that's not what typically happens. Redaction can be a form of self-censorship, but it's not always the same.
Censorship is when a third party, generally a person in authority, suppresses information which is considered objectionable. The 'authority' can be the same as the author (e.g. 'self-censorship'), or the suppression can be indirect -- it need not be editing per se.
It's my understanding that "redact" is used only in reference to written documents that are being edited, while 'censor' is more general and can refer to anything. The terms are closely related, especially in their typical use, but they're not exactly the same. "Redact" is actually a more specific and precise word for what's going on in this instance. We can argue about whether censorship is also going on, but redaction definitely is.
Anyway, arguing about definitions by citing dictionaries is always a bit pedantic, since dictionaries are not authoritative except as a historical reference: they can tell you what a word meant at the time the dictionary was written, but not what it means right now, since a word's definition is determined by its usage. All language is inherently arbitrary: they're just sounds we make or things we write down in order to convey ideas, and the relationship between the sounds/characters and ideas is not fixed, but infinitely variable. If everyone were to decide tomorrow that 'redaction' meant the same thing as 'censorship,' that's what it would mean, and next year's dictionaries would have to be updated to reflect that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Kind of kills the market for the third party vendors who already provide tools which do just that.
Maybe those vendors would have an anti-trust case against Adobe for doing it.
Would be ironic given Adobe's anti-trust allegations against MS for essentially doing the same thing (adding a "Save as PDF" tool to the MS office toolbar).
I googled for redacted doctuments, chose some pdfs at random, and found that the text is behind the black bars.
When I started searching, I googled for redact. There were two ads for products that remove the text from the pdf as well as create the black bar. One made it clear that the text would be inaccessible from hackers.
So, why aren't these types of tools being used for all redactions?
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
Congratulations, Slashdot! The FBI will be along shortly to raid your offices on suspicion of violating the DMCA, the Patriot Act, and probably some other bullshit piece of legislation we don't even know about.
Oh, yeah - it's a no-knock warrant, so put your pants on now.
Here's a linkto see the pdf in html format (minus the black boxes of course).
Why do geeks assume that everyone else in the world are idiots?
It is more likely that this "mistake" (wink, wink) was intentional.
Many here are so smug about how much smarter they are than the poor person who didn't understand how PDFs work. In reality, it is the those smug people that come out looking gullible and naive. Somebody plays a little bit blonde, and you eat right out of their hands.
Excuse me, any electronic format, unless it is a bitmap format, will have this problem unless
all the viewers 100% honor the redaction as it's intended. In the case of a bitmap format,
you can burn a black or white rectangle into the original image and then add an annotation
a la TIFF's annotations that contains the original portion of the image that was redacted
in an encrypted format so that it's difficult to expose the redaction- IF you need to have
the redaction exposed. If not, you hand across the redacted image as-is without annotations.
This has NOTHING to do with PDF or ODF at all- trying to make this a connection to these
is bogus to say the least. In this case, I believe that the people doing it used the MS Office
redaction capabilities and then exported the redacted content to PDF, which the export
carried the same sort of redactions across to the other format. What happened is because
someone didn't understand the tools they were using, not because of PDF or ODF.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If redacting is the "the careful editing of a document", obviously this wasn't a redacted PDF.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
While you make a good point, the people who have to use computers to accomplish their jobs, but do not make an attempt to understand how they work (and just treat them like "black boxes") are taking an enormous risk. They are hitching the metaphorical wagon of their livelihood to a team of horses that they don't know shit about.
If you were somebody who made your living in television, but didn't understand anything about it, you would likewise be taking a great risk. You might, for instance, look like a big idiot when you show up to work at your anchor desk wearing a horizontally pinstriped shirt (which looks like ass on TV because of the Moire effect between the lines on the shirt and the TV scanlines). If you had understood the technology a little better, you might not have done that. That's a trivial example -- undoubtedly if you were a TV anchor, you'd learn or be told at some point not to wear a shirt like that without having to learn about scanlines -- but I hope you see my point.
Whenever you use a technology without learning about it, you accept a certain amount of risk. Sometimes, you gamble and win: you just use the technology, get your job done, and nobody's the wiser. You're faster, more efficient, more competitive, you look like a hero to your boss, whatever. But if the technology doesn't work, then you're SOL -- but that's the price you pay for not understanding it. That's the risk you accepted when you said to yourself "eh, I don't really care what goes on inside there."
In the case of PDF, we have a lot of people using a certain technology without knowing anything about how it works, and thus -- like the TV anchor in his pinstriped shirt (or a weatherman wearing chroma-key blue or green) -- you get these gaffes.
I'm not saying that everybody needs to learn about how everything they use all day works, down to the bare metal. Virtually nobody needs to know that, except perhaps people who are doing things that are so dangerous that they can't afford to fuck up. However, people should be aware of the tradeoff they're making and the risk they're accepting when they forgo figuring out the internal details of a system and simply accept it as a whole, on faith that it will always work a certain way. As long as people are aware of that decision, and make it consiously, and accept the results, you can't ask for more.
Generally speaking: faith is a fine thing, as long as you know when you're relying on it. It's when you thought you were relying on something else, and find out that you had nothing but faith, that a problem has occured.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...unless you've got something to hide.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I selected his face with the cursor in my browser and it turns out he's mouthing an insult to your momma under that black band...
Yuck, who wants to use kpdf, xpdf or gpdf (or adobe!)
less file.pdf
no cut and paste necessary.
Or even better
less file.pdf > file.txt
You'll probably have to hit Ctrl-C for a second to get less to quit, I couldn't find an option to do this.
I am pretty sure that rasterized PDF documents violate government disability-access guidelines, since they can't be read with screenreaders, braille terminals, or basically anything other than a set of human eyes (or a good OCR program).
They would be a lot better off going through the document in Word (or Notepad/Textedit/vi/EMACS/whatever) and just selecting the regions of text that they want to remove, and replacing it with [-- TEXT REMOVED --] or even [REDACTED]. If they were really slick, I'm sure somebody could write a little macro to replace the text with an equivalent number of characters of whitespace or random text or dashes, to preserve formatting. (Okay, so to really preserve the formatting it would have to be replaced with characters that have the same amount width as the deleted characters; maybe there's a font-set containing various widths of whitespace characters that they could use? In TeX it would be trivial.)
The results would be ugly (but really, were black bars ever very beautiful?) but at least it would actually remove the information, and wouldn't result in an inaccessible, rasterized document.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What a bunch of two digit wqnkers these Federal bozos are. Not learning from your mistakes is the halmark of an idiot. Haven't they learned from Microsoft Word?
How to secure a PDF document
1. Print a hardcopy of the document
2. Get a magic marker and black out the parts you don't want read
3. Scan the document as an image (no OCR)
4. "Print" the scanned image to PDF
5. ????????
6. Profit!!!!
(MRC="hopefuls")
Why doesn't Adobe upgrade their PDF generators to include a "Real Redact" button that actually deletes the redacted data? They could sell it to governments at the usual 1000x government markup rate, and the government would probably still save money vs the fallout from these illusory blackout follies. Neither the government nor Adobe is in the "freedom of information" camp. Maybe the government just refuses to buy an upgrade because that would save money overall.
--
make install -not war
CLI programs are REALLY useful to look at "hidden" content.
'pdftotext' comes with xpdf & is even available natively on windows.
Similarly, for MS Word documents, you may use 'antiword', 'catdoc', and 'wv'.
These programs are quite nice in that they can easily batch-process a lot of documents & then you can go grepping through them for interesting tidbits.
(On the GUI front, evince deserves a plug. It uses the same poppler backend as xpdf and kpdf. I used to use tiny & fast xpdf for most of my pdf viewing, but evince has a few nice features which xpdf lacks & has become my personal favorite pdf viewer.)
What You See Is Not What You Get ...
The industry at large (Microsoft being a big offender) has been trying to get us to a this magical place where everything is system and location independent and this is where we end up:
1) FTP sites in Windows Explorer look like regular Windows folders. People expect them to work like regular folders. I had a field sales force try to "share" an Excel spreadsheet expecting the others to get a "Read Only" copy just like would happen on a local network share. Overwriting madness ensued. You can't blame them, there was no indication that it would work differently. Asking them to understand FTP is like accounting expecting me to fully understand the accounting rules behind my IT purchases.
2) A manager where I used to work had an Excel spreadsheet with payroll data for the entire company. He wanted to send each department their subset of the data. So he filtered his spreadsheet and sent the filtered lists to each department not knowing that he was sending each department the whole list under teh covers. Luckily, the file was 30MB and choked in the mail server and I was able to bail him out of that huge mistake. But you really can't blame him - he saw something on the screen and sent "it". There should be an indication of underlying data. BTW, doing a cut and paste special made each file about 25k or so.
Same thing with this PDF error. If your file shows certain information, it should contain that information only or indicate (or warn) otherwise.
By "simplifying" everything, nobody knows what's really going on. A couple times per week I have to explain some type of issue to some user about how "It's really more complicated than that, see Windows (or an app) hides this from you." User roll eyes as their simple task has become obscurely complicated - all in the name of making things "easier" to understand, ironically.
If something works different, it should be displayed different - that at least gives the user a chance to question what they are doing.
This works with Xpdf and KPDF, too
Yes, but if I'm that fortunate, I'll be scripting the whole thing with a call to ps2ascii.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Does anyone think that this may not have been an oversight, and that someone knew the geeks would figure it out (like we did before) and wanted it to be leaked??? I know it's giving someone a lot of credit, but stranger things have happened...
"But this one goes to 11!"
If black squares count as a "technical measure" protecting access to a work... ? Someone actually should go ahead and launch this suit, to draw attention to the DMCA's shittiness.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
They say you should open the original document in Word and EDIT the document by replacing the redacted text with a bunch of X's then print it to a PDF. That's a fundamentally different process than redacting. It's editing, and the temptation to ALTER the document would be huge. Also what would you do if you don't have the original Word document?
Doing it right isn't so hard. You want to end up with a graphical only PDF of the document that has been redacted. (I can't believe I'm about to give the NSA good advise on how to keep secrets!)
Use acrobat to mark out all of the evidence of your wrongdoing (oops I meant mark out anything classified...) Save it. Open it in a third party pdf program like FoxitPDF reader. Print it to a new pdf file using you PDFwriter of PDFdistiller print driver. You should now have a completely graphical pdf with no embedded text in the file. This is just as good as printing it, redacting it, then scanning it (which would be another good procedure.)
It may look all blocky and pixelated but redacted documents from the government always look like crap.
-- QED
Assuming the original document was in Word format, I'm surprised they didn't use Microsoft's freely available redaction add-in.
Even better: just import into kword. All the redacted text magically appears right in your word processor. No copy/paste necessary.
KWord can import PDF files directly into a document.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
For all the dipshits out there who don't know the difference between cut and copy, here are the basics: Cut deletes the selected text while saving a copy of it in the clipboard. Copy just copies the selected text to the clipboard. If the original or source text remains unchanged, you are not cutting, you are copying. Saying cut and paste is about as intelligent as my former boss saying that he had to "flush" [sic] out the development plans. Oh, and, by the way, more/most + adjective = comparative/superlative case 99% of the time. More simple and most deadly are about as wrong as Bush's presidency.
The solution is simple. "Save As Redacted" on the file menu which would save the file as a graphic or set of graphics within a PDF file structure.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
)
that is all
If you cut and past the text from that PDF, it tells you where they buried Jimmy Hoffa!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is like the Read Only option in M$ Word. All you have to do is save it under another name, make any changes, then give the file the original name. It doesn't add any security and only makes it more difficult to make changes for someone authorized to make changes. They use this all the time at my office as if it makes the document more secure.
seriously... why'd u let the cat out of the bag? there should've been an agreement amongst all nerds and geeks not to have told anybody about these blacked out pdf's... so when the NSA does release their pdf's about jfk and the roswell aliens, we would've been able to read it all in plain text
Frankly it doesn't matter- if you've got a hex editor, you can see the data, even if all PDF clients enforce the edit.
"Saying cut and paste is about as intelligent as my former boss saying that he had to "flush" [sic] out the development plans."
No, not if you look at the origin of the term. Yes, people originally did physically cut sections of text and paste them to other sections of text for a typist to retype. Cut-and-paste can refer to the entire set of operations that can be performed using cut/copy and paste tools. Also, yone should not use [sic] outside of a quotation -- it is used to indicate that the error was not in the quoting, but in the original speech. In this case, you are paraphrasing, and the quotation marks serve the purpose of indicating that it was his words, and not your misinterpretation.
"More simple and most deadly are about as wrong as Bush's presidency."
'Most deadly' is an acceptable superlative, though not the most common.
Oh, and your use of 'wrong' is incorrect -- wrong should not be used to modify 'presidency' in this sense -- your meaning is unclear. When 'wrong' is used as an adjective, it is meant to differentiate between two or more possibilities that relate to a given condition.
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and taking the pedantry that far (especially when you are incorrect, as there are often uncommon, but acceptable, usages of which you are not aware) is ridiculous.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Why go through the trouble to cut/paste. It works just fine in Acrobat to do a "save as text".
This is perfect. No need to worry about god-awful-slow page-reflows in long documents (which is a seperate MS Word issue but what can you do).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Or just maybe the UI is fine and the user selected exactly the tool he/she wanted.... This is a case about leaks, after all.
I wonder whether it's possible some of the people doing this really want the truth to come out? That someone "accidentally" screwed this up?
Oh, wait, we're talking about the government?
Nevermind.
If you undertake measures to read what's been blacked out, are you violating the DMCA? Aren't those blackouts intended to conceal something? And you are intentionally circumventing them? Illegal, no? I sure hope this is pursued in court.
They used a poor (specialized) tool for the job, judging by the redacting application linked in this comment, which is described as:
So the problem is likely that they used a tool that was designed for the task of redacting, but the tool doesn't work as it should.
Clearly, there is a market for a "redaction tool" easy to use, and "failsafe" (viz. should not just overwrite the text, it should remove it appropriately and replace the area of the text with blackout material for "the record").
How come Adobe (or others) aren't marketing such a tool?
Using Evince, GNOME's document viewer, you don't even have to copy to another document. Merely selecting the "redacted" text shows the actual text.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
If it's the MS implimentation, it usually mutilates documents beyond usefulness. That's close to what the NSA usually does, but not the legal requirement.
They're gonna blame this on Adobe or the PDF format itself.
20-odd years ago, would-be employees put basic IT-skills on CV's and were asked about these skills at interview. Nowadays, if you go for a white collar job it's assumed that you have basic word/excel/ppt skills. Problem is, the vast majority of people can tip-tip-tap on a keyboard but how many have had any kind of formal training in even basic IT skills? It beggars belief just how inefficiently people use computers to perform even simple tasks. Don't believe me; show someone one of the more common keyboard shortcuts in Word or Excel and watch their eyes glaze over. Then ask him or her if they know how to program the clock on their VCR. The world is full of luddites who just don't have the motivation/drive/opportunity/encouragement to learn how to use IT systems properly.
Those ignoramuses!
The proper way to conceal the information is to apply white out on the monitor!
"My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
I've been using the free FoxIt Reader as my permanent replacement for the free Adobe Acrobat Reader on Windows. It owns. Here is a link: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php It's very light, and is downloaded as one executable (zipped up, no crappy setup). It supports the highlight and copy for the "blacked out" text.
Oh man, that brings back some memories! Late nights cranking out code on my Bunyan 2500 - that puppy went through three cords of oak a week, and it kept the place warm to boot.
My modern Dell laptop can do that too, and it doesn't even need wood! Technology!
http://www.theinquirer.org/?article=32550
This reminds me of the Homer Simpson's "Mister X" Web site :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your sig: "If only we could make stupidity more painful..."
Ignorance can be cured, stupidity is forever. Why make stupidity painful? Better to make ignorance painful.
They say "ignorance is bliss". I think this needs to change.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Okay... this is what is considered secured??
...]
Using a STANDARD pdf handling tool:
% pdftotext BALCO_quash_subpoena_sfchronicle.pdf
From the PDF->TXT file:
[snipped to first line before the "blacked out section"]
C. Movants' Efforts to Obtain the Secret Grand Jury Transcripts
[beginning of first blacked out section]
Prior to the return of the Balco indictments, the lead defendant, Victor Conte ("Conte"), began to correspond via e-mail with Movants. (See Ex. 1 to Donnelan Aff.). Neither Movants nor Conte attempted to keep their relationship confidential, as the e-mail correspondence routinely was reported by Movants.2 (Exs. 1, 2, 3, and 11 to Donnelan 1
[... snipped for berevity
On June 23, 2004, Fainaru-Wada sent an e-mail to Conte indicating that he (Fainaru-Wada) was busy working on some stories that may be "up on the web soon. Hope you like t
hem." (Ex. T to Hershman Decl.). Conte responded that he was looking forward to seeing the article and that his lawyer would be available for comment. (Id.).
[end of first blacked out section]
D. Disclosure of the Montgomery Grand Jury Transcript On June 24, 2004
[more, but why post it when you can read it yourself!?]
Okay... WTF!? Doesn't ANYONE check this stuff before it goes out the door!?
OMG! Wonder if this is how our private documents are "made safe"....
Winged Power Photography
Right click on the blacked out text starting on page 18 in the document the article links to here.
A popup menu appears with the phrase "Lookup XXXXX" where XXXXX is the word that is blacked out. Cool, eh? =)
The only way this should be done where redaction is absolutely required is to completely remove the data from the document. You need to reflow the text as well to obscure the size of the redaction boxes. If it's a proportional font and you know it's kerning properties, you can write an app to determine a list of probable words that would be that length. The best thing to do is to remove the data are replace it with a standard sized REMOVED block or some other token.
There are bunch of comments wondering "how can people be so dumb?". I think the problem is a lack of realstandards in software. Microsoft claims .doc is a "standard", when in fact it is only a standard through their marketshare. What I mean by "real standards" is a set of specifications that does not change for the majority of computer users, and is completely free to implement (non-patented, no NDAs).
This set of standards would encompass things like text, audio, and video. Text would be (hypothetically) plain text, OpenDocument and PDF. These things would be how people work with text 95% of the time, and being open standards, could have training manuals written about their structure, how to work with them, how to protect data that you don't want released, etc.
Standardization has happened in other industries. I believe the American accounting industry was at one time extremely proprietary in its methods, requiring NDAs for exiting employees, but are now much more standardized in their practices. Unfortunately, I believe I heard this on NPR or something (Google is turning up nothing). Help me out here.
My favorite blacked-out text:
"I've become somewhat paranoid about e-mail these days. My wild imagination at work."
Nothing to see here. Move along.