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Microsoft's Default Font Is at the Center Of a Government Corruption Case (thenextweb.com)

Posted by msmash on from the great-deduction dept.

Calibri, a font that was created in 2004 and made default option on PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and WordPad by Microsoft in 2007, is currently sitting at the center of a corruption investigation involving Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. From a report: Accused of illegally profiting from his position since the 1990s, Sharif is now under investigation by the Joint Investigative Team -- a collective of Pakistani police, military, and financial regulators -- after a treasure trove of evidence surfaced with 2016's release of The Panama Papers. In a report obtained by Al Jazeera, investigators recommended a case be filed in the National Accountability Court after concluding there were "significant gap[s]" in Sharif's ability to account for his familial assets. [...] Sharif contends that neither he, nor his family, profited from his position of power, a denial that came under scrutiny today after his daughter and political heir apparent, Maryam Nawaz, produced documents from 2006 that prove her father's innocence. Unfortunately for the Nawaz family, type experts today confirmed the documents were written in Calibri, a font that wasn't available until 2007.

29 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. And his poor brother San Sharif... by dyfet · · Score: 5, Funny

    I could not resist...

    1. Re:And his poor brother San Sharif... by unixisc · · Score: 5, Funny

      And his humorous cousin Comic Sans Sharif

    2. Re:And his poor brother San Sharif... by dcw3 · · Score: 2

      I hate you...I came to post the same thing. Bravo sir.

      --
      Just another day in Paradise
  2. Well, that didn't go well by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just ask Dan Rather how that sort of thing plays out.

  3. Worst Font Ever by crow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I despise Calibri. About half the emails I receive at work use it, and it's absolutely horrible for reading. Even comic sans would be better.

    Maybe it looks alright when printed out, but who prints anymore? On my screen it's painful. Microsoft is trying to gouge my eyes out. All they care is that people use a font that is only available with their products.

  4. Same issue as the Dan Rather/George W. Bush papers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I recall this same issue came up with the papers Dan Rather came up with about George W. Bush's military service. Just a note to all you forgers out there - use vintage equipment if you're producing documents after the fact! I presume we'll soon see a similar case where the tiny dots that printers produce will call out a printed document produced on a machine that did not exist at the time of printing.

  5. Sharif don't like it by scourfish · · Score: 5, Funny

    Rock the bad font
    Rock the bad font

  6. Reminds me of Dan Rather & CBS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dan Rather was adamant that they had genuine documents proving that George W. Bush shirked his duty in the Air National Guard and avoided being drafted to Vietnam.

    Unfortunately for Rather, these documents were conclusively shown to have been written with Microsoft Word, and Word wasn't around during the Vietnam era...

    Rather was shown to be a biased laughingstock with no credibility, and retired.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    1. Re:Reminds me of Dan Rather & CBS! by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Funny

      Karl Rove is a genius; supplying fake documents of real facts to discredit the truth. Brilliant!!

    2. Re: Reminds me of Dan Rather & CBS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No. What happened was that Bush managed to turn the conversation from "what the fuck was Bush actually doing while in the military, and why are all the records missing," to "Dan got some fake documents so move along, nothing to see here."

  7. OT: E-mail should not specify font by mi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I despise Calibri. About half the emails I receive at work use it

    I despite people/software, which prescribe, what font the remote recipient is supposed to use to view your messages. Stick to the content, not presentation.

    Oh, and if your web-site insists on visitor loading and using particular fonts (except, maybe, for the icon-collections), you should kill yourself too. /rant

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:OT: E-mail should not specify font by Altrag · · Score: 2

      Except presentation is super important, at least for promotional and PR purposes. Graphic design is a major industry specifically because you're wrong.

      Sure if its just your coworker giving you a 2 sentence status update about some project or other they probably shouldn't be spending a bunch of time screwing around with fonts and colors and strong lines and whatever other graphic design BS that's way over my head.

      But the front page for a company website? It damned well better look good and the easiest / best way to do that is if you can fully control the layout. That's why you see websites that are strictly formatted for 1024 pixels width for example -- the designer decided that restricting the size to the largest "common" screen width they felt they could get away with rather than letting the browser fuck up their layout (you could rightfully argue that there are better ways to write webpages that still give you sufficient control over the layout, but they're much more complex and not everybody knows how to do that or has time/motivation to educate themselves in the latest tech when what they already know mostly does the job.)

      Basically, appearances matter, and fonts are part of appearance.

  8. Does it really prove it? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I have an ASCII file that was created back when I was in grad school. I open it in my favorite text editor and issue a print command. The default font chosen by the text editor did not exist back when I was in grad school. Does it mean the text file did not exist then?

    I don't know MsOffice font handling directives saved to the file. Does MsOffice explicitly names the default font in the save document? Or it just leaves it as "default font"? If a document is saved in the default font of 2006, and I open it today, does it display it in today's default font or will it use the default font of 2006?

    Please don't dismiss it some stretched speculation made just for the sake of argument. MsOffice files are very very convoluted. For a long time, changing your default printer would change the margins on the document. Every grad student who chose to write the thesis in MsWord discovered it to their consternation. Pagination and margins change randomly. If someone else using that computer changed the printer or installed a new font, the thesis file saved on disk would print differently and it would fail mechanical check in the Registrar's office.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:Does it really prove it? by Known+Nutter · · Score: 2

      Did you consider that the documents were hard copies?

      No, you did not.

      --
      Beware of the Leopard.
    2. Re:Does it really prove it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      He's asking the question on how the font for a Word document is stored. Specifically, he's raising the following two scenarios, one of which is a convoluted way to suggest that the document isn't a forgery because the article only expresses that the document is from 2006 and provides no indication on whether the document may have been created in 2006 but printed only recently.

      Scenario 1: When the document is saved the font for the document is saved as Word's default font.
      Scenario 2: When the document is saved the font value for the document is only recorded if it was changed from Word's default font.

      In the case of scenario 1, then a document saved in 2006 should have opened with the font that was the default font in 2006, in which case the document is a forgery. In the case of scenario 2 the document would up displayed as Calibri in which case there's insufficient evidence from a paper version of the document to determine whether it is a forgery. It's only suggestive that it's forgery.

    3. Re:Does it really prove it? by rholtzjr · · Score: 2

      I don't know MsOffice font handling directives saved to the file. Does MsOffice explicitly names the default font in the save document?

      Word binary format. I will let you make that determination. A quick perusal says yes, it saves the specific fonts used inside the document throughout the document. That is why it allows you to mix fonts,size,bold,etc...

      Remember WYSIWYG standard?

    4. Re:Does it really prove it? by Cajun+Hell · · Score: 2

      I had the impression that in TFA, the disputed documents were printed papers themselves, not files; their claimed physical age is what was used to give them an air of authenticity. Perhaps not?

      I have an ASCII file that was created back when I was in grad school. I open it in my favorite text editor and issue a print command. The default font chosen by the text editor did not exist back when I was in grad school. Does it mean the text file did not exist then?

      It means that the printout you hand over, wasn't really printed back then. You tell someone "ho ho ho, behold this physical piece of paper that I printed in 1989 on a HP Laserjet II!" You get a rusty key from somewhere, and then pull (with a stylish flourish) a dusty cloth off of an ancient filing cabinet. "How about that, the key still fits after all this time." You open the filing cabinet and it creaks, as though with great age. "Let's see, where would my old document be? Nope, this is the Declaration of Independence. Nope, this is the original handwritten manuscript of 'Macbeth.' Ah, here it is: METALLICA.TXT in the top line, and a 1989 date next to it, and you know a timestamp is very hard to fake! This paper has been lurking unseen in my filing cabinet all this time, waiting to once again be greeted by the harsh florescent lights of the 1980s but is now strangely bathed in LEDs, the likes of which people back then, could not imagine. Feel the history! But first, put on these latex gloves because there is no telling what will happen to this ancient paper after having been in storage for so long." But they call you on it, if they have a trained eye.

      They probably looked at the paper with great scepticism, due to your strange speech beforehand and the overdoing of theatrics. Who says "behold?" And am I really supposed to believe that since the filing cabinet is old, it must be dusty even though everything else in the room has been cleaned at least once since 2013? You should introduce documents more casually in my stories than you did in that one. No wonder you got caught!

      --
      "Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
    5. Re:Does it really prove it? by rholtzjr · · Score: 2

      Depends on what type of font it is and what file format the document was saved. Basically, there are 4 main types of font format used this day and age. Raster, Vector, TrueType, and Postscript (there is a newer one called OpenType which is TrueType with Postscript support). Here is a pretty good explanation So this I believe would be dependent on the word processor application and how it handles the different types of font formats. Since the font MAY be embedded in the document, the word processor will have to recognize it from the list of format from above. If it can't then I suppose that the word processor would warn the user that the document format could not be recognized and ask them if they would like to convert (fix) said document (at least one would hope it would ask).

      If you used Open Office and saved as a Word 97 document I would think that you would not run into the issue of it defaulting to Calibri. If saved as an RTF document it is possible that may be your culprit.

  9. Was the font available in 2006? by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The article seems to confuse two issues: the creation of the font in 2004 and making it the default font in 2007.

    If it was available in 2004, but simply not the default, then the documents could have been created with this font in 2006.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    1. Re:Was the font available in 2006? by Guyle · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A pretty good case was made here that it was, in fact, available as early as 2005 and became part of Windows Vista in 2006, in addition to rolling out with Office 2007.

    2. Re:Was the font available in 2006? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      your honor, no one knows how to change fonts except nerds. is the defendant claiming to be a nerd?

    3. Re:Was the font available in 2006? by whoever57 · · Score: 2

      I think that the pretty good case doesn't look as good when you dig a little deeper.

      The page referred to in the forum you linked to doesn't seem to have the date show by google (Dec 7, 2005) anywhere in the actual page. Archive.org doesn't show anything for the site before 2015 and ... the domain name has a creation date of December 2014. It looks like Google is showing a bogus date.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    4. Re:Was the font available in 2006? by scdeimos · · Score: 2

      Microsoft has questions about using Calibri in Word 12 back in 2005, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c..., so clearly it was generally available before 2006.

  10. Re:Printed at a later date? by guruevi · · Score: 2

    Unless the old font didn't exist anymore on the computer and then Word will happily replace it. If it were PDF's that would be something different. You can't guarantee that a Word document will look the same in the future, it's why you don't use Word.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  11. Re:Same issue as the Dan Rather/George W. Bush pap by deesine · · Score: 2

    TV journalists, and whistle blowers. A similar issue came up last month with government contractor whistle blower Reality Winners, who failed to realize every page from a color laser printer has an id pattern watermark. They're difficult to see without a loop and blue/black light. The printers I've used the pattern was in yellow, lower left corner of the page.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
    https://www.eff.org/pages/list...

    --
    damaged by dogma
  12. I though ... by PPH · · Score: 2

    ... Pakistanis used that font which looks like a bunch of caterpillars crawling across a page.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  13. Re:Same issue as the Dan Rather/George W. Bush pap by hvidstue · · Score: 2

    By loop, I assume you mean a magnifying glass or microscope?

  14. Re:Same issue as the Dan Rather/George W. Bush pap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, he means a Loupe, which is a specialized variant of a magnifying glass used by jewellers and others.

  15. Re:forensics by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 2

    Your solution sounds complicated, and depends on specific storage mediums. Fortunately, there is a simpler alternative. This happens to be one of the things that blockchains are particularly good for. Whenever you create an official document, just sign it and upload the detached signature to the Bitcoin blockchain. In the event of a dispute over the historicity of the document you can point to the matching entry on the blockchain to prove that the document existed at that point in time. The proof-of-work algorithm and corresponding computation time expended by Bitcoin miners ensures that transactions older than a few hours are nearly impossible to tamper with.

    --
    "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat