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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but why are people so terrible at redaction? The PDF at https://quad9.net/uploads/URT_05_12_2023_en_Korr_MH_en2_2e62... literally just drew black boxes over text that's still copyable :(

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Hi - the guy who wrote the blog speaking here - I'm the General Manager for Quad9. You're right - this was done by the team a bit too hastily. However, the document is public as a court filing, try to be as cautious as possible with people's names in online filings. We wanted to keep the PDF as intact as possible so people could cut/paste other parts of it for reference without having to dig up the actual document from the courts, or having to do error-prone OCR work on a PNG.

Interestingly, one of the things I didn't need to see redacted was the name of the domain itself - we publish that in the blog post text. Previously, we'd blocked it out of previous documents in an abundance of caution so that we could not be accused of promotion of the site by an obtuse mis-reading of intention. Everyone here has been working nonstop on this case for a long time, and we'll try to fix this tomorrow after some sleep.

Most people simply have no interest in PDF primitives, and rightly so. If you're a lawyer, it's not supposed to be your job to be an expert in PDF's underlying information structure.

Every PDF editor ought to have a big flashing warning explaining to use a redaction tool instead, every time a user attempts to draw/move a black rectangle over text, or "highlight" text black.

This is a crystal-clear case where it's not the users being dumb -- it's the technology failing the users.

Counterpoint: "that should do the trick" is good enough for most people, but not for lawyers.

I disagree. Yes, they don't have to know how to program a PDF redaction tool, but they should certainly be proficient in using one. One of the functions of a lawyer is deciding what information another party doesn't need to know, and if they leak it in such a way, that's definitely a failure on their part, even if the software should have been more clear.

Of course it's their responsibility in the end. But they only have to worry about it in the first place due to the bad usability of the software.

My point still stands: it's not about users being terrible. It's about the software design being bad. Software should always be designed to suit humans, not vice-versa.

...and that includes human lawyers, too.

Adobe Acrobat actually does pop up if you try to add a black highlight and asks if you meant to redact instead, but then you can't actually use the redact tool unless you pay for Acrobat Pro.

Which was helpful for me to learn that all of this was about a freaking Evanescence album and not even the album with that one hit song but one from 2021. I cannot believe all of this was over an album that has under 100m streams on Spotify. What a waste of money for everyone involved.

Evanescence is really the hill Sony Music wants to die on. Wow.

IANAL but IIRC If you don’t enforce your own copyright then it can set a precedent for you not having the protection of a copyright.

You're thinking of trademarks.

> ... black boxes over text that's still copyable

I didn't even need to copy it. I was reading through it and as my cursor glided over one redaction, it turned into a pointer finger and displayed the URL underneath it in the bottom of my browser.

Edit: Just tested it, and I could click right through to the redacted website directly from this PDF.

Because technology (and reality) is deep. Human comprehension is a shallow collection of approximations and simplifications - albeit in different areas for different people, but the point is that no one mind is capable of understanding everything anymore. Changing the background color to black looks like redaction, it would be redaction if it were printed out, the average consumer of documents has no idea about the details of ObjStm layering and text selection ordering in a PDF.

Considering it was uploaded by Quad9, who did not want to block these websites, perhaps the ineffective redaction was an "accident."

This is the one redeeming argument I know for printing out PDFs, redacting them, and scanning them again.

To be honest, I also wouldn't be 100% confident in my own abilities to properly redact a PDF in any other way! (Maybe by going through a PNG, which saves some paper but otherwise still breaks everything else that printing and scanning would break too.)

You just need to print it out and rescan it with _redacted.pdf added to the name. Solved

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