Slashdot Mirror
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.
Come on, now.
Bravo.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Worstest pun I think I've ever seen on /. Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!....OK, maybe I smiled a little.
Rock the Calibri! Rock the Calibri!
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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.
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.
Sure, Sans Sharif was corrupt but still, nobody is looking forward to Prime Minister Komik Sans. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
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.
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.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
I stole this Sig
So, if you did not like it, would you call it a Comic Sans?
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
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.
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"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."
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"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."
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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?
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!
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.
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.