FOI Request: leet speak (FBI) | Hacker News Reader

FOI Request: leet speak (FBI)

muckrock.com

70 pointsdanso23 comments

This is the worst rendition of PDF I've ever seen. Is it done on purpose to prevent OCR?

FTA: "This list has about 2800 entries you should find useful in your work or for keeping up with your children and/or grandchildren"

I think they are worried about metadata and similar info being embedded and not properly redacting it. This is a fool proof method against that.

Not only OCR, i'm unable to read the thing, unless with extreme strain to the eye.

Here's the link you actually want: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1199460/responsive-doc...

Thanks for the link. We include a direct download link right on the page but ...

We made a conscious business decision to skip having ads, to not have a paywall, and even to let you view and download 100% registration free because it's what we believe in. But hotlinking PDFs on highly trafficked places has a huge negative impact on an already very tight budget. Using our viewer, or only downloading if you're actually interested in the docs, saves a lot of money and helps us continue our government transparency work ad- and paywall-free.

Thanks!

You should consider building a viewer that's usable on mobile devices then. It's nearly impossible to read your document on a phone.

Additionally, I couldn't find the PDF link from my phone either.

Thanks a lot for the feedback: Download links are right under the thumbnails of the respective file, but I'll work to add them in the main document view, too:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/62n8umb9jcaqfv4/Screenshot%202014-...

We are definitely working on a better viewer, with a mobile redesign due in a few months, but we don't have any full time developers on staff: My cofounder and I both have day jobs, and our main focus is making sure we continue to get and publish government records as efficiently and openly as possible.

The reality is also just that there aren't really any great PDF viewers we've found on the web, though we're definitely open to suggestions/inspiration if you have one you think works really well.

I'd recommend having a play around with PDF.js from Mozilla, it's the default PDF viewer in Firefox, and is open source and lightweight.

http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/

I couldn't figure out how to read the document in Chrome for Windows either. At least... I don't think I was reading it. I just saw a bunch of garbled text.

How about using a torrent then?

Since we have a lot of "longtail" documents, torrents aren't a great solution for reaching a mass audience + making sure we can reliably offer access to 339,957 pages of various government documents in tens of thousands of PDFs.

We are actively looking at doing monthly dumps, a la StackOverflow, of all our documents and data, and we'd like to do that via Torrent. As soon as I get a few day to hack on it ...

I'd like to see a FOI request for information on their process for creating such low quality PDF documents responsive to FOI requests.

It looks like it really stumped the FBI to determine what "leetspeak" actually is, given that the only responsive document is the Twitter acronyms summary. (Is it even fair to call most of these "Twitter acronyms"?)

Did they purposefully try to make this un-OCRable?

So I see 83 pages of twitter shortspeak as the only thing released in this FOI Request, it is possible that there are leetspeak terms defined there, but I did not bother checking.

Wow. Way to not actually respond to the request.

If you see something, leak something.

Otherwise we'll continue to get crap like this.

My favorite: WTFT What the French toast? (polite WTF)

Or, slightly below that: WYLABOCTGWTR = Would you like a bowl of cream to go with that remark?

Seriously, though, I think most of this list was drawn from a common source. Doing a Google search for a few of the acronyms in conjunction yields a bunch of very similar lists.

Yeeahhhh TOAST !!!

This is barely readable. Wow FBI(even if it's for OCR reasons)

New headline is much less descriptive than the old one...

> CYA = see ya/cover you're ass

Cringe.

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