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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

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Hamuko·

Even big black boxes require some amount of skill.

https://twitter.com/Phthalaldehyde/status/133471474074092748...

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Other fun things I've seen (e.g. when double-blind reviewing):

- Someone makes the background color black in Word and saves as PDF. Text is still selectable - Someone draws a black rectangle over the text in Word, text is still searchable / rectangle can be removed with any simple PDF editor

Can't facepalm enough. Just, amazing incompetence.

People say the same thing about scans of printouts. But I guess there is a reason for those.

Those at least destroy any non-visible data.

I feel like contrast enhancement or similar would be able to bring that back.

That’s also why they scan in b&w with a potato. Also has the side-effect of making many graphs/charts impossible to interpret.

> "with a potato"

This is either a typo or I want to know more about it.

It's an Internet running Gag, if the quality of something produced by a technical product is bad, you might say: "Was this filmed/calculated/etc with a potato?"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/reco...

But customers are always right, which is why Acrobat these days has special features to do this. Besides deleting letters under it could affect layouts.

> Besides deleting letters under it could affect layouts.

Which is in and of itself a security risk. Not only can the length of the redaction give an estimate on the length of the password, but for variable width fonts, could even rule out many passwords using pixel measurements between the text on either side.

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