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EG8 Publishes Report In Noninteractive, Nonquotable Format
pbahra writes "You could not come up with a better illustration of the clash of cultures that was the eG8 than the post-forum report. Was the output of the two-day gathering in Paris published on a website so people could link to it? Or perhaps a blog so that people could comment on it? Or even a wiki, so the people who attended could contribute and correct mistakes? No it wasn't. The report is a book. Or rather it is an eBook. Except it isn't even an eBook, in the sense of something that you can read on your Kindle or other eBook reader. It's actually a Flash-based page turner, the sort of thing that was all the rage five years ago. It is a digital facsimile of a book. It is the triumph of design over access. Being Flash, you can't even cut and paste what is in the file. And being Flash it gives complete and total control to the authors. As a user all you get to do is to read it, in exactly the way the authors want you to. It looks good, but you can't do anything with it, except what the authors tell you to do. Metaphor anyone?"
Its Flash. You know, the Devils Platform according to Apple. So no, they had nothing to do with it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
But a feature, from the POV of the creator.
Are you still living in the squalid ghetto of the "reality-based community"?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Naw, easier to hire some guys form outside the Home Depot to transcribe the document.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You could always click on the 'Download' button and save as a PDF document - then you can do as you want with it.
Admittedly a blog or wiki would, perhaps, be nicer to use.
If they had comments, they'd have to hire fifty people just to moderate the Obama Kenyan Birth Certificate posts, anti-NWO posts, anti-ZOG posts, anti-TACMAR posts, Black Helicopters posts, anti-globalization posts, anti-Bilderberger posts, anti-Zeta Reticulan reptoid posts, anti Trilateral Commission posts...
It should still be quotable, though. Then again, did this organization produce anything worthy of quotation?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The first person to boast that they can read the report on their Xoom will Win The Thread, but probably lose the war.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Google tells me it is some sort of governmental meeting about the internet.
http://www.eg8forum.com/en/
Could the summary not have expended a sentence about this?
After reading the article linked in the summary and the article which that article linked to, the best I can come up with is that it is a meeting of executives from technology companies that want to have more say in the agenda of the meetings of the G-8 countries. Apparently, these executives do not understand technology well enough to release thier report in a readable electronic format.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Actually, on top of the flash, there is a picture of a floppy disk (who remembers those?). Clicking that lets you save the contents as a pdf, but you still need the flash plugin to "download" it.
I'd prefer to make a complex arrangement of mirrors and lenses that focus and re-orientate the view to 90 degree angles and point it towards my scanner.
That is the only acceptable way to screenshot.
It is the manliest way to screenshot.
The point of these sorts of security systems is not to stop a determined attacker, or even to stop an attacker with a low-level of expertise. The point is to be a speedbump, to prevent people from breaking the security system just long enough for the companies to turn a profit. It is also a way to play on consumer ignorance, since most computer users do not know how to set up OCR systems and hack Flash applets.
Really, a highly knowledgeable attacker will just take a snapshot of the memory of the process and pull the text right out of there. There is nothing they can do, short of mandatory TPM use, to prevent that sort of thing (and even then, it is likely that the TPM will fall victim to some kind of attack).
Palm trees and 8
Well, you could just reverse-engineer the container. That thing is powerful and with a moderately-skilled person, it's possible to copy raw text out of the demo instead of just reading it.
If you turn off JavaScript and load the page, you get a big Adobe ad for Flash, followed by a long bullet list of links to HTML pages of plain text. The plain text is all there, but the links to the pictures and video are not.
Funny, I seem to be able to download the open source compiler for Flash directly from Adobe.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You could have included a link to the actual book in question...
http://www.eg8forum.com/ebook/
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
I can only smile a little. There was a time when if a journalist wish to use a quote from a speech or a report, he or she would copy it out by hand, on notepads or (as a later terrific innovation) using a typewriter. Now, all the bloggers complain "I can't sweep my mouse/trackpad cursor over it and just copy and paste it - what shall I do, what shall I do!"
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
Apparently they went with "Fluidbook", which appears to be a French clone of Scribd, only uglier and even more pointless. As we all know, the best way to read text on screen is by using your mouse to manipulate a 3D rendering of a book... Just like the best interface for an audio player application is a painstakingly bitmap-rendered and non-resizable facsimile of a 1970s stereo.
At least they didn't disable the PDF download button, though that is a pitiful consolation.
According to the webpage of the vendor "all text is available in both flash and HTML formats" so that search engines can find it. Spoofing your browser ID to the googlebot might get you something of greater use.
Also, according to the sourcecode of the page, it does a check for mobile browsers and just drops the PDF directly on them, without trying flash(because, after all, dubiously-reflowable PDFs are far superior to HTML on tiny little screens. Spoofing a mobile browser ID should net you the PDF without the flash, in any case.
So I downloaded it, and then ran pdftotext on it. http://pastebin.com/gXqKceEZ No story here. Just a rant from Ben Rooney. He'll feel like an idiot when he realizes its just a PDF.
Funny, I seem to be able to download the open source compiler for Flash directly from Adobe.
Hey, what are you, some sort of hacker or computer programmer or something?
Since when did they start allowing people who understand all this computer code stuff to make comments on slashdot? I'll bet you're even using the "classical" setting to read the summary (and maybe even TFA).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
He probably already realises that it's a PDF, because he even states that iPad users see a 76-page PDF if they go to the site, as if that's somehow a bad thing. Oh no! The bad people published it in a DRM-free, ISO-specified, format with multiple independently implemented readers!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Or click the download button and download the freely available PDF. Your way is good too though....
I remember when Slashdot posters would read an article, think about it, and post their own submission. This posting (and a majority on /. these days) merely copy and pasted the first few paragraphs of the article. That plagiarism, as it says "(user) said...". Hell, how do we know it isn't a bot grabbing content at this point? I see CmdrTaco approved it.. c'mon Rob..
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Here is the dastardly flash file in question. Pretty straightforward? Rather nice, actually? Scrolling and enlarging is functional and intuitive? My machine is ancient, yet it handled things quite well. Naturally, it won't cross the walled garden of Apple, but I suppose we all pay our little prices for our little vices.
If you are using NoScript, you get a list of HTML files, and no pictures.
Here is the PDF file. You can perform a copy and paste with no trouble? And if you have an impairment that prevents you from reading it, the file is accessible to your text-to-speech software.
The actual text of the files in question seems rather bland, really? There's nothing earth-shattering or unexpected, since the real meat & potatoes of each presentation was verbal, not written.
This post seems much ado about nothing.
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