Comment by jm4
2 months ago
It often comes down to not using the right software and training issues. They have to use Acrobat, which has a redaction tool. This is expensive so some places cheap out on other tools that don’t have a real redaction feature. They highlight with black and think it does the same thing whereas the redaction tool completely removes the content and any associated metadata from the document.
This was basically the only reason we were willing to cough up like $400 for each Acrobat license for a few hundred people. One redaction fuckup could cost you whatever you saved by buying something else.
I would like to believe that the DOJ lacking the proper software might have something to do with DOGE. That would be sweet irony.
If my law firm can't afford the $20/month for a copy of Acrobat Pro, I'd be very concerned what else they are cutting corners on.
Law firms are notoriously behind in tech. I’ve seen some shit. A small firm running on the owner’s personal Dropbox account with client matter files stored alongside his porn collection, ancient, unsupported software, unpatched systems, basically zero information security, servers in a bathroom and network switches in a shower, a literal hoarder with garbage and shit in the office, etc. The Dropbox guy was basically a giant in his practice area. Very successful. You have no idea how bad things are behind the scenes.
I think it's usually a bit more complicated, i.e. the people who were expected to do processes don't and someone else shows the people asking for access that there's a faster, cheaper, cooler tool.
This is to be expected from an effort like DOGE simply because the E is for Efficiency. That is, how well a system is performing. The ratio of energy input to output.
Unfortunately the E in DOGE should have been for Effectiveness. That is, is the system shooting at the right target, and how close is it to hitting that target.
You can be very efficient but if you’re doing the wrong thing(s) you’re ultimately wasting resources.
The irony is, DOGE got the E wrong. It’s efficient but not effective
Or it a scam run by someone who wants to get access the social security info on americans. We are in trouble if you think the acronym is the biggest issue
I was speaking to the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. DOGE is simply the current best example.
Putting the obvious aside, sure, it’s Trump’s fault the system was so mismanaged that he’s been able to get elected. Twice. You’d think that after the first term the system would have gotten the message. It did not.
My recommendation to you is ask: How did we get here? And who is accountable for this?
There’s a very good chance those giving you your current narrative marching orders are on that list. Funny, right? Why own their failure when they can convince fools to blame a symptom?
not even, anyone still left at DOJ working to protect the president is immensely corrupt, and this is just that careless stupidity that typically goes along with deeply corrupt people.
I feel like the number of incidents related to "fully public S3 buckets" has gone down after AWS made it nearly impossible to miss the notice.
I think someone just got free marketing materials to promote the redaction tools.
Now much more people will be aware of the issue.
Are you saying that only Adobe PDF has proper redaction tools? I did a quick search and found several open source PDF tools claiming to do redaction- are they all faulty? I would honestly be surprised if there aren't any free tools that do it right.
No that's not what GP is saying. GP is saying that there is software that does not have a redaction feature (perhaps because the developer didn't implement it), but users of the software worked around it by adding a black rectangle to the PDF in such software, falsely believing it to be equivalent to redaction.
Properly implementing redaction is a complicated task. The redaction can be applied to text, so the software needs to find out which text is covered by the rectangle and remove it. The redaction can be applied to images, so the software needs to edit a dizzying array of image formats supported by PDF (including some formats frequently used by PDFs but used basically nowhere else, like JBIG2). The redaction can be applied to invisible text (such as OCR text of a scanned document). The redaction can be applied to vector shapes, so some moderately complicated geometry calculations are needed to break the vector shapes and partially delete them.
It's very easy to imagine having a basic PDF editor that does not have a redaction feature because implementing the feature is hard.
For the same reason, a basic PDF editor does not have a real crop feature. Such an editor adds a cropbox and keeps all the content outside the cropbox.