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.

Comments

Re:A redacted document? Say it ain't so!

[The Only Druid]

"Redacted" is a legal term of art (i.e. it has a special meaning in the legal context).

For lawyers/courts/etc., redacted (Per Black's Legal Dictionary) means:

n), n. 1. The careful editing of a document, esp. to remove confidential references or offensive material. (Cases: Criminal Law 663; Federal Civil Procedure 2011; Trial 39. C.J.S. Criminal Law 1210-1211; Trial 148-153.) 2. A revised or edited document. -- redactional, adj. -- redact, vb.>

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.

Common problem with today's UIs

[Namlak]

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.

MS Word Redaction Tool

[blackstripe]

Assuming the original document was in Word format, I'm surprised they didn't use Microsoft's freely available redaction add-in.