Once I worked for a company that got a quote in the form of a Word document. Turned out it had history turned on and quotes to competitors could be recovered.
There is a lot of incompitence when it comes to file formats.
For one of my first jobs I negotiated a better offer because "strings" on the document revealed the previous offer they'd sent out, and made me confident I could ask for more.
Though, makes me wonder if someone has intentionally sent out offers like that with lower numbers to make people think they're outsmarting them.
You don’t even need a digital format for this. When I was a consultant I waited in a room with a flip chart for a negotiation. I flipped through the “old slides” of the flip chart and found one where they did budget planning for the project. This was very good background info for the negotiations.
Similarly, I’ve been sent PDF proposal letters by my customers with redacted pricing from my competitors so I can compare the scope against mine. A simple unflatten reveals the price along with the scope.
If I have a sheet of paper and I color a section black. That's it. It's black. No going back.
So I can see people thinking the same for PDFs. I drew the black box. It's black. Done. They don't realize they aren't dealing with a 2D sheet of paper, but with effectively a 3D stack of papers. That they didn't draw a black box on the page, they drew a black box above the page over the area they wanted to obscure.
The fact that this happens a lot is an indication that the software is wrong in this case. It doesn't conform to user expectations.
Having lots of people involved means that it's more likely to be malicious compliance or deniable sabotage. It only needs one person who disagrees with the redactions to start doing things that they know will allow info to leak.
> Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence
Hundreds of people might be involved, but the only key factor required for a single point of failure to propagate to the deliverable is lack of verification.
And God knows how the Trump administration is packed with inexperiente incompetents assigned to positions where they are way way over their head, and routinely commit the most basic mistakes.
Once I worked for a company that got a quote in the form of a Word document. Turned out it had history turned on and quotes to competitors could be recovered.
There is a lot of incompitence when it comes to file formats.
For one of my first jobs I negotiated a better offer because "strings" on the document revealed the previous offer they'd sent out, and made me confident I could ask for more.
Though, makes me wonder if someone has intentionally sent out offers like that with lower numbers to make people think they're outsmarting them.
Never match wits with a stringscillian!
You don’t even need a digital format for this. When I was a consultant I waited in a room with a flip chart for a negotiation. I flipped through the “old slides” of the flip chart and found one where they did budget planning for the project. This was very good background info for the negotiations.
To be fair handling Word documents is much more complex than redacting a PDF properly.
Similarly, I’ve been sent PDF proposal letters by my customers with redacted pricing from my competitors so I can compare the scope against mine. A simple unflatten reveals the price along with the scope.
I'm sure not all those hundreds have been involved with every document.
I'm kinda surprised (and disappointed) nobody has done a Snowden on it though.
I think it's more that the analogy is broken.
If I have a sheet of paper and I color a section black. That's it. It's black. No going back.
So I can see people thinking the same for PDFs. I drew the black box. It's black. Done. They don't realize they aren't dealing with a 2D sheet of paper, but with effectively a 3D stack of papers. That they didn't draw a black box on the page, they drew a black box above the page over the area they wanted to obscure.
The fact that this happens a lot is an indication that the software is wrong in this case. It doesn't conform to user expectations.
Having lots of people involved means that it's more likely to be malicious compliance or deniable sabotage. It only needs one person who disagrees with the redactions to start doing things that they know will allow info to leak.
Doesn’t having lots of people involved also raise the chance of incompetence?
You’re more likely to get at least one inept agent in a random sample of 1000 than a sample of 10.
Yep - I think they're both likely.
> Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence
Hundreds of people might be involved, but the only key factor required for a single point of failure to propagate to the deliverable is lack of verification.
And God knows how the Trump administration is packed with inexperiente incompetents assigned to positions where they are way way over their head, and routinely commit the most basic mistakes.