Calibri Font Plays Its Role: Pakistan Now Sans Sharif as Prime Minister is Disqualified (neowin.net)

Usama Jawad, writing for Neowin: A few weeks ago, we reported that Microsoft's Calibri font has been used as evidence against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his family in a corruption case. Today, Sharif has been disqualified from his position as a part of the court's final verdict of the case. The case concerns the "Panama Papers", which is a collection of 11.5 million documents detailing information related to over 200,000 offshore accounts. Ever since the Panama Papers were anonymously leaked back in 2015, there has been a major shift in the political situation in many countries. One such country is Pakistan, where the names of numerous members of the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's family were spotted in the papers. If you aren't aware of the Calibri controversy, it is as follows: Nawaz Sharif's daughter Maryam Nawaz submitted photocopies of several documents in order to deny any corruption, but it appears that the documents contained Microsoft's Calibri font, even though they were dated February 6, 2006. It is important to note that the font wasn't commercially available until much later. Despite being created in 2004, the font did not reach the general public until January 30, 2007.

Comments

Sans Sharif

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, now.

Re: Sans Sharif

[Anonymous Coward]

What's really sad is I'll bet a fair number of us were hoping for this outcome, just for the bad pun setup.

Re:Sans Sharif

[K. S. Kyosuke]

In Pakistani politics, the Times Roman, they are a-changin'...

Re:Sans Sharif

[Chris Mattern]

In Pakistani politics, the Times Roman, they are a-changin'...

Now they're Times New Roman!

Re:Sans Sharif

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharif don't like it.. Rock the casbah!

How come no article about the Awan brothers and their IT involvement in the government? Far more "on-topic" around here than the trannies in military article.

Re: Sans Sharif

[Anonymous Coward]

The headline STILL makes no sense. Something tells me that Miss Mash was born without a cerebral cortex.

Re: Sans Sharif

[omnichad]

Do you want someone to teach you about fonts and serifs or are you too lazy to look for yourself? The pun is funny.

Re:Sans Sharif

[xevioso]

Why the hate? It's a Helvetica joke, after all.

Re:Sans Sharif

[skovnymfe]

It's ripped directly from reddit, where it was a top comment yesterday to a similar story, and that comment was probably ripped from somewhere else too.

Re: Sans Sharif

[omnichad]

What part doesn't make grammatical sense? Looks good to me, even without hyphenation.

Re: Sans Sharif

[Maritz]

It makes perfect grammatical sense. Sorry, but it does.

Slashdot headline of the year.

[Oswald McWeany]

Bravo.

Re:Slashdot headline of the year.

[cloud.pt]

But he was ousted now, so it makes sense in the NOW of things. Man I laughed so hard

"Sans Sharif"

[Verdatum]

Worstest pun I think I've ever seen on /. Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!....OK, maybe I smiled a little.

Headline

[shortscruffydave]

Well played, sir...well played

Well done submitter.

[Hatechall]

I just wanted to congratulate the submitter. News for nerds and a grade A pun in one go. Well done.

So using Microsoft products...

[Anonymous Coward]

So using Microsoft products can indeed make you loose your job!

Sharif don't like it!

[uncoveror]

Rock the Calibri! Rock the Calibri!

Re:Pakistan is a terrorist country

[CriticalYetLazy]

So when one 1:10 are pro ISIS/terrorism/etc, you declare a whole country as "terrorist"? In the same respect, western countries are gay, since they have, an average, about 10% gay people? There may be a lot of off shit going on over there, but this kind of generalism is really foolish.

Re:Guess whose name appears 3,540 times?

[aicrules]

Wow...documents that have been out for over a year are going to now become an issue that will lead to this chain of scandalous events? Sorry, if they were going to be an issue for now President Trump they would have been an issue before he got elected. That's not to say that people like you won't continue to claim there is something when there's nothing...but there really is nothing.

Microsoft TCO

[Thud457]

This should be a big wakeup call to all C[E|O|I|T|X]O's to not use Microsoft products. Ever.

Re:Microsoft TCO

[slew]

This should be a big wakeup call to all C[E|O|I|T|X]O's to not use Microsoft products. Ever.

FWIW, you can generally use Helvetica (1957) or Ariel (1982) fonts (even on Microsoft products). But if you want an "open" font,... your options are limited.

Only DejaVu Sans (2004) would probably be the only font that fit the appropriate required timeframe, but it isn't the most popular default today on open source only distributions which are LiberationSans(2010), FreeSans (2010) Open Sans (2011). In addition to the Carlito font which is their replacement for Calibri (which by definition places it even later in time than Calibri.

If they had enough technical insight to change the default font, they could have just use Ariel or Helvetica, even on Microsoft products. Not that there aren't other reason to steer clear of the MSFT tax (aka product), but this ain't one of them.

Re:Microsoft TCO

[tlhIngan]

FWIW, you can generally use Helvetica (1957) or Ariel (1982) fonts (even on Microsoft products). But if you want an "open" font,... your options are limited.

Only DejaVu Sans (2004) would probably be the only font that fit the appropriate required timeframe, but it isn't the most popular default today on open source only distributions which are LiberationSans(2010), FreeSans (2010) Open Sans (2011). In addition to the Carlito font which is their replacement for Calibri (which by definition places it even later in time than Calibri.

Depends how "open" you want it. Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web were released way back in the late 90s and Microsoft stopped distribution in 2002. They are not open fonts, as they are still copyrighted and come with licensing terms, but are openly distributable if you agree to certain conditions (i.e., files are kept as shipped - same filename, same packaging), so they are still available, at least the last versions Microsoft released under those terms.

In fact, because of those terms, the Open-Source crowd has made tons of neat utilities to download and install them on Linux. Or your distribution's non-free may already have it, kept in nice .exe format files that an open-source utility unpacks to get at the ttf file inside. (There's no requirement to actually RUN the installer).

They aren't "free" or "open", but they are publicly available on every OS that can understand TrueType ttf format.

Fark?

[0100010001010011]

What is this, where am I, what year is it.

Meddling fonts

[ArhcAngel]

And I would have gotten away with it too. If it hadn't been for those meddling Sans Sherif fonts.

What are you, some kind of Comic Sans?

[theurge14]

What are you, some kind of Comic Sans?

Oh, well that's just great! >:(

[Gravis Zero]

Sure, Sans Sharif was corrupt but still, nobody is looking forward to Prime Minister Komik Sans. ;)

Credit where credit is due

[argStyopa]

You know, we give the OPs a lot of crap for non-tech, repetitive, political news.

But that has to be one of the best title/article postings in years.

"Calibri Font Plays Its Role: Pakistan Now Sans Sharif"

Well played, sir/madam.

Bad lawyers/researchers

[guruevi]

The Calibri font was definitely available although not immediately commercial, alpha and release candidate versions of Office containing the font appeared as early as 2005.

Re:Bad lawyers/researchers

[DRJlaw]

The Calibri font was definitely available although not immediately commercial, alpha and release candidate versions of Office containing the font appeared as early as 2005.

I can't decide whether you're trying to point out an interesting, but not dispositive fact, or whether this is an example of typical Slashdot lawyering. Preponderance of the evidence, or even "reasonable doubt," does not turn on whether one can construct an improbable situation in which documents could be authored using Calibri.

They've thought of that.
---
"The first public beta version, according to a Wikipedia entry, was released on June 6, 2006 -- close to four months after the papers were said to have been signed by Maryam Nawaz."

* * *

"Responding personally to the question separately, font designer de Groot said, 'While in theory it would have been possible to create a document using Calibri in 2006, the font would have to be obtained from a beta operating system, from the hands of computer nerds'.

'Why would anyone use a completely unknown font for an official document in 2006?' he went on to question.

'If the person using Calibri was such a font lover that he or she had to use the new Calibri, then he or she should be able to prove that other documents were printed with Calibri in 2006, and these prints should be in the hands of other people as well,' he wrote his email addressed to the newspaper."
---

That last bit is the pertinent question. If you're arguing that the documents are authentic, where are the other 'official documents prepared using Calibri' that would have been prepared at the same time? Even if the government copies of the Nawaz documents were lost, where are the government copies of those other non-Nawaz Calibri documents? Do the government's records of documents prepared at that time ever contain ones prepared in Calibri?

Panama papers vs wikileaks

[liquid_schwartz]

The Panama papers have done more than Wikileaks with much less publishing. More hacks along those lines, exposing the 1%, is how reform can be accomplished. Its the best use of the NSAs all seeing power that I can think of, even if it is a pipe dream.

reminds me ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

... of a certain major news network waving around a Microsoft Word generated document to "prove" that a certain president had dodged the Vietnam War draft ...

Re:reminds me ...

[Zero__Kelvin]

That is actually an excellent point. Just as those documents didn't change the fact that Bush was a draft dodger, these documents don't prove Sharif is guilty. The major difference here, of course, is that Calibri was in fact available whereas Word definitely did not exist when Bush dodged the draft. It seems to have escaped the press that Sharif was not a member of the general public on the documents purported creation date.

Re:Pakistan is a terrorist country

[unixisc]

While 1 in 10 may be pro ISIS, other 9 support other Jihadist groups, like the Taliban, al Qaeda, Lashkar e Toiba, Jaish e Mohammed, Harkat e Mujahedeen, and a plethory of Islamic alphabet soup of Jihadist groups. So yeah, that whole country IS terrorist.

Re:Pakistan is a terrorist country

[loonycyborg]

9% a lot lower that can be expected for a muslim country given that ISIS is the kalifate reborn.

Precedent for font analysis

[dcavanaugh]

The first time I saw fonts at the center of an investigation was the CBS story about George W. Bush's military service. The CBS news story presented a document from the 1970s that was supposedly from an IBM Selectric typewriter when in fact it was from an Apple Macintosh using Microsoft Word default settings and a Palatino font. At the time, I was surprised to see how obvious the forgery was, and how easily it was exposed. Without this case, I wonder if anyone would have investigated the Calibri font in Pakistan.

Re:Precedent for font analysis

[Zero__Kelvin]

I can guarantee that the Bush Draft Dodge was far from the first time font analysis was used, and that font forensics predates computers by a very long time.

Re:Precedent for font analysis

[vux984]

The CBS news story presented a document from the 1970s that was supposedly from an IBM Selectric typewriter when in fact it was from an Apple Macintosh using Microsoft Word default settings and a Palatino font

Sure presenting it as the original typed document; would be fairly obvious as forgery. But that doesn't necessarily mean the original doesn't exist somewhere else; and we're looking at a reprint/copy from OCR made 20 years ago on a mac that got then got 'discovered'.

Now, I'm not saying that is the case with George Bush's military service, or even that it is probable or possible in that particular case.

I'm just saying "haha document was printed from word, not on an IBM selectric, case closed" isn't really valid.

I found, for example when cleaning out my office a short story I'd written when I was a kid; typed into a TRS-80 using Telewriter 64, and originally printed on an epson dot matix. But the copy i found in my office, was a reprint I'd made 10 years later on an Apple LaserWriter at one of my first jobs; testing OCR software. The epson source document didn't turn up.

What would font analysis etc "prove" about the time of the original story ? Nothing. It just proves when that copy was made.

Re:Precedent for font analysis

[dcavanaugh]

Before computers, there were typewriters (almost all of which used a Courier font). There was forensic analysis of typed documents, based mostly on matching tiny artifacts and inconsistencies to individual typewriters or possibly a brand/model of typewriter. Modern font forensics is a whole lot easier if all you care about is establishing the approximate year when a font became available. In the Killian documents case, nobody cared about matching the documents to the original typewriter or printer, they cared about whether or not the font existed when the documents were purportedly written. The ability to do this quickly and cheaply is relatively new, enabled by a proliferation of font types. If everyone still used Courier exclusively, it wouldn't be easy to prove anything by merely identifying a font.

Re:Precedent for font analysis

[Zero__Kelvin]

Fonts existed not only well before typewriters, but well before Gutenburg, and have been used to refute and help confirm the validity of ancient texts. Good luck learning about fonts!

Re:Guess whose name appears 3,540 times?

[quantaman]

Wow...documents that have been out for over a year are going to now become an issue that will lead to this chain of scandalous events? Sorry, if they were going to be an issue for now President Trump they would have been an issue before he got elected. That's not to say that people like you won't continue to claim there is something when there's nothing...but there really is nothing.

The Watergate break-in (and arrests) happened June 17, 1972.

The Saturday Night Massacre was October 20, 1973.

The impeachment investigation started February 6, 1974

The first article of impeachment was July 27, 1974.

Nixon resigned August 8, 1974.

That's over 2 years from crime to impeachment for a simple break-in/cover up. You think they're going to charge a Presidential candidate, much less a sitting President, for financial crimes after this short an investigation?

And, in case you haven't been following the news, Trump's escalated war on the DOJ has coincided with news that the Mueller investigation was starting to look into finances. I don't know if Trump is implicated by the Panama Papers specifically, but there's a ridiculous amount of smoke surrounding the Trump Organization.

Re:Guess whose name appears 3,540 times?

[Tjp($)pjT]

That's not how confirmation works. Have the job, then get reappointed? New confirmation hearing. Confirmed as a Federal Judge but appointed to be on the USSC? That means a new confirmation hearing! If the senate adjourns (breaks for longer than 3 days) POTUS can make a recess appointment which allows the office holder until the end of the next session of congress to hold the office without Senate confirmation. Of course if the Senate confirms them they stay in the position.

Even worse...

[Roger W Moore]

So, if you did not like it, would you call it a Comic Sans?

Sans Sharriffe?

[colinwb]

The pun might not be new, but it was new to me, and I enjoyed it's aptness. I also hope that the pun was partly a nod in the direction of the (un?)famous 1977 April Fools' Day extended hoax by The Guardian: San Serriffe

Re:We're about to lose a corrupt leader too! IMPEA

[Tjp($)pjT]

Conservatives were vocal about constitutional transgressions of Obama but wow. They did not have the former president and former failed candidate backing them with playbook on how to be disruptive. The likely hood Trip will be impeached is nil. The democratic leadership doesn't want Pence as POTUS for one. The other is there is no proof of Russian collusion. Expending the efforts of many US government workers and investigating vigorously the best they have come up with is his son met with a Russian attorney who wanted to discuss getting rid of the sanctions on some Russian citizens. While you may think some Trump staffer's actions, even if family, can bring down Trump, it just isn't so. It has to be Trump's actions. And has to meet the "high crimes and misdemeanors" standard or Trump has to be proven incompetent ... And sadly for you, enacting policy against what you personally believe is appropriate is not incompetence. Trump can declare war on Russia (extremely unlikely scenario) and that is not incompetence. Trump can invade North Korea and wipe it from the face of the earth, still not incompetence. Trump can play water polo and request bills be presented on waterproof paper and sign them in a pool with a space pen. Still not rising to the level of impeachment. Obama wrote EOs that changed legislative intent, circumventing the separation of powers, also wrote EOs that downright created new law effectively, also unconstitutional. The constitution really doesn't allow a Presidential edict to circumvent Congress. No impeachment for Obama. Clinton had sex in the oval office with a staffer, constituting gross misconduct and definitely a violation of the laws against using a position of power to entice sex from a subordinate. And it doesn't matter if she was participatory, he violated the law. He lied to congress. He asked what the definition of "is" is. Clinton was impeached but not found to have risen to the standards for actually being removed from office.

Good luck trying to get Trump impeached because you don't like the way he's going about doing his job.

Re:Pakistan is a terrorist country

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this get +4 insightful? I guess 4 out of 5 mods like completely fabricated statistics??

They must not have heard of Dan Rather

[robkeeney]

You'd think that people would know better than to just toss something off on their computer and back date it by now.The internet will find you out!

Re:They must not have heard of Dan Rather

[bill_mcgonigle]

We don't read many news stories about the good forgeries.

Re:Pakistan is a terrorist country

[laie_techie]

Uh, 10% is an order magnitude too high for LGBT population (inclusive, not just "gay people").

[Citation needed]

Wikipedia has an article on this topic. In a July 2014 government survey, 1.4% of Americans self identify as gay or lesbian. A Gallup poll from 2012 showed 3.4% self-identified as LGBT. Note that 3.4% is significantly lower than 10% and higher than 1%, but 1% is close to 1.4% for just gay or lesbian.

Re:Pakistan is a terrorist country

[unixisc]

B'cos it's true! 3 of the groups I listed are Pakistani Jihadist groups based in Pakistan (1 of them in Pak Kashmir), and the other 2 have their main presence there.

Re:We're about to lose a corrupt leader too! IMPEA

[whoever57]

And has to meet the "high crimes and misdemeanors" standard or Trump has to be proven incompetent

Please tell me what is the definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors"?

You can't because it isn't defined. Congress could decide that jaywalking is a high crime or misdemeanor, and impeach on that basis.

Impeachment is a political process, not a judicial process.

Re:Pakistan is a terrorist country

[unixisc]

Typical strawman. One is a legitimate organization under laws that SJWs loathe, while the other is a defunct organization w/ just a handful of members that barely does 1 terror act a year either within or outside the US. The groups I listed are all active terror groups in Pakistan that are either active in day to day terror acts within Pakistan itself, or use Pakistan to back terror acts in Afghanistan or Kashmir.