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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.
...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.
You don't even need to go into vector graphics with these people. All you need to do is attempt to convince them that white text is still text, or that black text on a black background is still text. Either way, the text is still there. The only way to ensure that it's gone is to ACTUALLY GET RID OF THE TEXT.
This guy's the limit!
You would think that people would have learned after the first time around. Apparently not.
You're giving people too much credit; as has been noted in this forum many times, the average computer user is not exactly bright and doesn't read Slashdot, so they would have no idea that this is a problem. People just assume that if something appears to work a certain way, it in fact works that way.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
No, more than likely they will just pass a new law, stating that "Copying and pasting of blacked out (redacted) lines is a felony" or somesuch...
My grandfather used to say that there is one irreducible requirement for training a dog: you have to be smarter than the dog.
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
"Security by obscurity" :)
Why not have a handy context menu option, "Redact selection"
Because management and clueless users will demand that there be an "unredact selection" menu option, also. I'll let you sort out the implications of that. Either that or original copies of documents everywhere will have text permanently blocked out by the above-mentioned clueless users and management types.
This guy's the limit!
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
NSA? Since when does the NSA redact subpoenas for the District Attorney?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
I think that's called the DMCA
Alternatively, perhaps the technology is at fault. If the same mistake is made over, and over, and over again, many user interface experts would start investigating whether it's the UI, not the user that's at fault. The argument is that the mistake is being made because the correct solution is not intuitively obvious.
I'd be curious to know what tool the users are using to black out the text. Are they just exporting from Word but, before exporting, "blocking it out" in Word? If so, how? Are they putting black blocks over text, or setting attributes of the relevent text? If these are the wrong techniques, what can be done to make the right techniques obvious (and the wrongness of these techniques equally obvious)?
I've designed enough crappy UIs in the past and justified them with "It's user error! All they have to do is hit the OK or CANCEL buttons, of course it's not going to work if they close the window instead!" and other such stuff that, with hindsight, was utterly wrong and elitist of me, to know that technically skilled people are not the best judge of intuitiveness. The fact is, I'm a programmer. You're probably technically minded too. The average user isn't. We can't avoid making assumptions about what the user thinks works that are, on occasion, completely, 180 degrees, wrong. What we can do is own up to them and try to determine how to steer the user in the right direction.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You're giving people too little credit. Most people who use computers are probably fairly bright -- they're lawyers, doctors, accountants, and all sorts of things most people on Slashdot can't do. Reading Slashdot doesn't make you bright (in fact, given much of hte drivel, just the opposite.)
But, they expect computers to work like a friggin' toaster, and to them, if the text it blanked out, it's not readable. They're not going to realize the 'black' is a representation of a rectangle in a different document layer, and that the actual internal tree of the PDF still contains the actual text. Really, how could they?
They understand computers by metaphor and analog to the real world. They don't know or care about the actual internal stuff. Since the paradigms have been done to look like the real-world, these people assume that the rest of the things also apply.
Many people use computers who don't have a full grasp on all of their intricacies. However, I haven't looked inside of a TV in 20+ years, but I'm comfortable using one.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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
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."
What happens when I actually want to print white text on a black background? Will I have to go through some convoluted process because setting the background as black doesn't actually change the background to black, but rather also eliminates any text contained within it?
This guy's the limit!
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."
"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."
"Another thing that pisses me off is incopetence."
Oh, the irony.
You know, considering the state our government is in, I would much prefer that someone would build into all software going to the government an "unredact" feature to make it even easier to recover government coverups.
Barring that, PLEASE don't educate them, or make it easier for them to really redact anything.
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
This is NOT scary. This is refreshing.
I would much prefer my government be unable to successfully keep secrets from me.
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
The irony here is that you're complaining about people being "so damn lazy that they can't do a little research" when you haven't taken the (very small) amount of time researching how to correctly spell Achilles.
Fortunately this does not apply to humans--not directly.
I can easily train people that are smarter than myself, if the conditions are right. For instance, I know a fair bit about statistics and data analysis, and would be perfectly comfortable training certain folks in the field, as long as they didn't know more than I do. Even then, it perfectly possible for me to come up with a unique idea that someone smarter than myself hasn't (note that I didn't say couldn't) considered.
In the public schools there are frequent cases of a teacher training a student more intelligent than themself. It is unavoidable, although it could be reduced by making sure only the smartest teachers were highered.
Smarter? Not a requirement. More experienced? Having unique knowledge? Yes, that is required, but maybe not irreducibly.
HAND
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Just because you're releasing the 12th printing of the 4th edition, does not make this a 'new book'.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Sometimes I wonder if these incidents are really "accidents" or somebody's way of feigning ignorance of technology to get the facts out to the public.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?