Anonymity proves grey area for IDScan

not even greyed-out

if you're using an old slow version of acrobat (v5) on and old slow machine (ancient sparc desktop at work) on an "obscure" OS (Solaris) then you can see the page render by first displaying all the images and then drawing grey boxes over the bits they wanted to obscure. Yes, it is the tried and trusted "here's all the data and these are the bits we don't want you to see" technique!

One way to keep the information secure...

I received 78 pages of emails from a Freedom of Information request last week. They had all been printed out, names "redacted" with marker pen, scanned in again, and turned into PDFs. A large amount of labour and waste of paper and ink, not to mention inconvenience for me not being able to search them without resorting to OCR, but at least the censorship was effective!

Export

If using Acrobat Professional then simply export all images.

Digital Tip-Ex

So basically, to keep details confidential, they've been relying on the digital equivalent of putting Tip-Ex on the screen?

This is the most utterly cretinous thing I've heard in a long time.

There really isn't a suitable icon for this. I'm not going to insult Paris. Using the Paris icon for this would be a gross insult to her intelligence.

@Resize

Or simply run pdftotext on it? If it's an image, though, even a rudimentary knowledge of the PDF structure should be enough to figure out which bits are overlay and then cut them out of the file.

All right, smartarses ...

What is the best way to securely remove words from a PDF document?

I'd like the result to be as small and as scalable as the original, so I don't want a giant image file at a fixed resolution.

Don't forget that if the original uses a variable-width font then with a dictionary it is possible to get down to a shortlist of just a few words by accurately measuring the space between the surrounding words (the word "map" is slightly wider than the word "nap", etc). So printing the document out, cutting the offending words out with scissors, then scanning the result, isn't even all that secure.

@All right, smartarses

The best way to remove the words is... any method that actually removes the words. In this case editing the photos of the cards before putting them in the PDF would have been the obvious answer.

Still there...

And how come they are mostly Scousers?

Jermey - Fakes

[quote]

"several of the cards featured by IDScan would appear to be fake rather than novelty."

Like which ones, exactly? They're all fakes - there's not a copy of a legitimate card amongst them.

[/quote]

A FAKE is a copy / imitation of a genuine card. A NOVELTY is a card that may appear to a casual observer to be an official card. Bit like a FAKE 20 dollar bill when compared to NOVELTY 20-whatever-it-is Monopoly money.

Still There

It's still there, late on Tuesday evening. Just after 8:50PM on 28/04/2009 as I write this, and it's still there.

Still There

Now it's Thursday afternoon, after 4PM on 30/04/2009 as I write this. It's still there.