17 ms·

> creator Lucas De Groot, who seemed skeptical of the font's use before its public release. "Why would anyone use a completely unknown font for an official docu

> creator Lucas De Groot, who seemed skeptical of the font's use before its public release. "Why would anyone use a completely unknown font for an official document in 2006?" > Microsoft's website states that version 1.0 of the font was available to download separately as far back as 2005. And, according to font consultant Thomas Phinney, Calibri was also available as part of a Windows pre-release in 2004. Back then many people were using beta-versions of Windows 2003 Server (or other server products) . Server edition was great desktop (compared to XP and Vista), but also very expensive. Prerelease version had 90 days trial period, which could be easily reset. MS Office format is basically a memory dump. So forged documents should leave much more evidence with timestamps, office patches versions, error handling etc...

netsharc 9y ago
Isn't the file format a zipped XML nowadays? It'd be hilarious if they said "Here's my 2006 tax report, but you need Office 2013 to open it."
- jankotek 9y ago
  Office97 was binary format, XML comed much latter as response to OpenOffice
  - auxym 9y ago
    Open XML formats (.docx, etc) came with Office 2003. From what I remember, the EU wanted to standardize an open document format, and had their eye set on OO ODF, as the most mature of those at the time. Microsoft put out their OXML format, gave out free patent grants, lobbied hard, and managed to get it into ISO. If you want some nightmares though, open an office XML file in a text editor some day.
    - nxc18 9y ago
      I wrote a tool to convert pptx files to markdown. Using python it was maybe a 3 hour project. I'm sure some of the more nuanced formatting is a challenge, but the format really isn't bad and keeps the content quite manageable.
      - xyzxyz998 9y ago
        You're not going to leave us hanging, are you?
        l1n 9y ago
        Not OP but it could be https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ppmd/0.1.1 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ppmd/0.1.1
        nxc18 9y ago
        That is in fact what I was referring to, although I don't think it should still be up. I wrote that and on a whim thought, "I'll make this a pip package," severely underestimating that task. The tool works but I never finished that packaging. The working source should be on github if you're interested.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - vetinari 9y ago
      > Open XML formats (.docx, etc) came with Office 2003. They came with Office 2007. For Office 2003, there was a plugin that allowed to open the XML files, in a limited way.
      - davidgerard 9y ago
        No, there was a separate XML format for 2003 before OOXML, called WordprocessingML. Basically nothing else ever used it, but later MS Office and LibreOffice still read it.
    - wglb 9y ago
      If you want some nightmares though It is not really all that bad. The hardest part of pulling it all out and reassembling it into what you want is the shared strings aspect. It is really quite distinct from the memory dump of pre-xml doc/excel files.
      - pacaro 9y ago
        For real. On Palladium/NGSCB there was a strong effort to maintain correspondence between documentation and code, to the point that there was an effort to have header files be generated directly from the specs, which were Word docs. The biggest practical challenge was that the extractor had to instantiate Word just to read the text content of paragraphs with the specified style. This is not something that you want in your build pipeline if you can avoid it.
        wglb 9y ago
        Ewwww. I woulda cobbled something together to suck the text out of them.
        pacaro 9y ago
        Hahaha, me too, but the old Word format really is as bad as everyone says, and we were trying to build a system with formal correspondence from spec to code (and sometimes from spec to proof to code), so having a "cobbled" together something really didn't fit the model. The real problem was using word as our documentation format, but at Microsoft in the early oughts there really weren't many alternatives.
        wglb 9y ago
        Well, I do believe LaTeX was available. The cobble-together part, to be successful, would pull the text out reliably. And the format is readily documented, and Open/Libre office processes it as well. The code to do the extract might be ugly, but so long as it reliably produced the text in a CI/CD environment, that would be OK.
  - oniony 9y ago
    Comed?
- skywhopper 9y ago
  It is, but many of the XML values and attributes are just dumps of bitfields and identifiers that are structured exactly as they are in memory. In other words, the XML format was mostly a PR move to stave off accusations of not being "open" enough, and the people who implement support for the new format still have to reverse-engineer a bunch of Office-specific binary nonsense.
omh 9y ago
> So forged documents should leave much more evidence with timestamps, office patches versions, error handling etc It looks like we may only have seen scanned copies of the documents, so any Office metadata would be missing. I wonder if there is any other subtle metadata. Perhaps default tab stops or borders?
- dm319 9y ago
  printer steganography?
  - throwaway91111 9y ago
    Unfortunately i don't think that would have much bearing on the origin of the content pre-printing.
    - rbobby 9y ago
      Except printer dots are a printer specific serial number. If it was printed on a recent printer then that might be concrete proof of forgery (i.e. if the supposed original document was submitted as evidence as having been contemporaneous of the document's date but was shown to have been printed much more recently because of printer dots). If you see what I mean... And I'm not really commenting on the current case (not familiar with it at all)... just positing a possible way to prove a document's date as inaccurate.
ghaff 9y ago
It seems as if the bottom line is that someone could have gotten their hands on Calibri for Windows at an earlier date than 2007. However, given this case, it seems rather more likely that they used the default font on the released product at a later date. Like most evidence, you can come up with alternate theories, but usually the obvious conclusion is the right one.
- Giroflex 9y ago
  The fact that it was indeed publicly available before 2007 kind of throws the whole thing out of the window, though. Even if it seems obvious, how are you going to prove that they didn't actually download the font or have the special Windows edition? Although it might turn public perception, it shouldn't, I believe, be considered judicially.
  - coldpie 9y ago
    This is what standards of proof are for. "Beyond reasonable doubt," "preponderance of the evidence," etc. You use different standards for different types of trials. In one trial you may ask, "is it more likely that this is a forged document using the default font, or that the user went out of their way to download an obscure font before its public release and specifically chose to use it?" In another trial with a different standard you may ask, "is there any possible way that this document was not forged?" The answer to each question is different, which is why we declare the standard of proof before the trial begins. Of course, I do not know the standard in use in this country's court system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_burden_of_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_burden_of_proof
    - smitherfield 9y ago
      Well, in politics as opposed to a criminal trial there's no such thing as burdens of proof, just whether a scandal has legs. Among American (and British, Canadian etc) lawyers who advocate quantifying the concept of "reasonable doubt,"[1] the consensus figure seems to be that proof beyond a reasonable doubt means greater than 95% certainty (or, stated negatively, a less than 5% level of uncertainty). Judge Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York[2] puts the 95% number in his jury instructions, for example. If we assume the Bayesian prior that it's at least 19x more likely that Pakistani politicians at the highest level of influence are secretly corrupt and/or evading taxes, than it is that they're secretly tech nerds who eagerly download the latest Microsoft betas and try out all the new fonts, then we have met that 95% standard. If the accused were a Microsoft executive instead of an official of one of the world's most corrupt states,[3] the equation would be different. Of course, there might be other arguments for doubt besides "the font was available in obscure beta software." One potential argument is that it's a newer version of an older document that was typeset in a different font, which was changed to Calibri at some later point (recent MS Words might default to displaying the document in Calibri if it were sent to a computer that didn't have the original font installed, or the file type doesn't include font information in a way Word supports, or it was copied and pasted from the clipboard). [1] Which IMO it should be; most of the clear miscarriages of justice in either direction that I know of seem like they could have been prevented or at least been mistrials if, as much as possible, we'd nudged the jury to carefully quantify the strength of both sides' evidence instead of voting emotionally. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_B._Weinstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_B._Weinstein [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

netsharc 9y ago

Isn't the file format a zipped XML nowadays? It'd be hilarious if they said "Here's my 2006 tax report, but you need Office 2013 to open it."

jankotek 9y ago
Office97 was binary format, XML comed much latter as response to OpenOffice
- auxym 9y ago
  Open XML formats (.docx, etc) came with Office 2003. From what I remember, the EU wanted to standardize an open document format, and had their eye set on OO ODF, as the most mature of those at the time. Microsoft put out their OXML format, gave out free patent grants, lobbied hard, and managed to get it into ISO. If you want some nightmares though, open an office XML file in a text editor some day.
  - nxc18 9y ago
    I wrote a tool to convert pptx files to markdown. Using python it was maybe a 3 hour project. I'm sure some of the more nuanced formatting is a challenge, but the format really isn't bad and keeps the content quite manageable.
    - xyzxyz998 9y ago
      You're not going to leave us hanging, are you?
      - l1n 9y ago
        Not OP but it could be https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ppmd/0.1.1 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ppmd/0.1.1
        nxc18 9y ago
        That is in fact what I was referring to, although I don't think it should still be up. I wrote that and on a whim thought, "I'll make this a pip package," severely underestimating that task. The tool works but I never finished that packaging. The working source should be on github if you're interested.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - vetinari 9y ago
    > Open XML formats (.docx, etc) came with Office 2003. They came with Office 2007. For Office 2003, there was a plugin that allowed to open the XML files, in a limited way.
    - davidgerard 9y ago
      No, there was a separate XML format for 2003 before OOXML, called WordprocessingML. Basically nothing else ever used it, but later MS Office and LibreOffice still read it.
  - wglb 9y ago
    If you want some nightmares though It is not really all that bad. The hardest part of pulling it all out and reassembling it into what you want is the shared strings aspect. It is really quite distinct from the memory dump of pre-xml doc/excel files.
    - pacaro 9y ago
      For real. On Palladium/NGSCB there was a strong effort to maintain correspondence between documentation and code, to the point that there was an effort to have header files be generated directly from the specs, which were Word docs. The biggest practical challenge was that the extractor had to instantiate Word just to read the text content of paragraphs with the specified style. This is not something that you want in your build pipeline if you can avoid it.
      - wglb 9y ago
        Ewwww. I woulda cobbled something together to suck the text out of them.
        pacaro 9y ago
        Hahaha, me too, but the old Word format really is as bad as everyone says, and we were trying to build a system with formal correspondence from spec to code (and sometimes from spec to proof to code), so having a "cobbled" together something really didn't fit the model. The real problem was using word as our documentation format, but at Microsoft in the early oughts there really weren't many alternatives.
        wglb 9y ago
        Well, I do believe LaTeX was available. The cobble-together part, to be successful, would pull the text out reliably. And the format is readily documented, and Open/Libre office processes it as well. The code to do the extract might be ugly, but so long as it reliably produced the text in a CI/CD environment, that would be OK.
- oniony 9y ago
  Comed?
skywhopper 9y ago
It is, but many of the XML values and attributes are just dumps of bitfields and identifiers that are structured exactly as they are in memory. In other words, the XML format was mostly a PR move to stave off accusations of not being "open" enough, and the people who implement support for the new format still have to reverse-engineer a bunch of Office-specific binary nonsense.

omh 9y ago

> So forged documents should leave much more evidence with timestamps, office patches versions, error handling etc It looks like we may only have seen scanned copies of the documents, so any Office metadata would be missing. I wonder if there is any other subtle metadata. Perhaps default tab stops or borders?

dm319 9y ago
printer steganography?
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  Unfortunately i don't think that would have much bearing on the origin of the content pre-printing.
  - rbobby 9y ago
    Except printer dots are a printer specific serial number. If it was printed on a recent printer then that might be concrete proof of forgery (i.e. if the supposed original document was submitted as evidence as having been contemporaneous of the document's date but was shown to have been printed much more recently because of printer dots). If you see what I mean... And I'm not really commenting on the current case (not familiar with it at all)... just positing a possible way to prove a document's date as inaccurate.

ghaff 9y ago

It seems as if the bottom line is that someone could have gotten their hands on Calibri for Windows at an earlier date than 2007. However, given this case, it seems rather more likely that they used the default font on the released product at a later date. Like most evidence, you can come up with alternate theories, but usually the obvious conclusion is the right one.

Giroflex 9y ago
The fact that it was indeed publicly available before 2007 kind of throws the whole thing out of the window, though. Even if it seems obvious, how are you going to prove that they didn't actually download the font or have the special Windows edition? Although it might turn public perception, it shouldn't, I believe, be considered judicially.
- coldpie 9y ago
  This is what standards of proof are for. "Beyond reasonable doubt," "preponderance of the evidence," etc. You use different standards for different types of trials. In one trial you may ask, "is it more likely that this is a forged document using the default font, or that the user went out of their way to download an obscure font before its public release and specifically chose to use it?" In another trial with a different standard you may ask, "is there any possible way that this document was not forged?" The answer to each question is different, which is why we declare the standard of proof before the trial begins. Of course, I do not know the standard in use in this country's court system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_burden_of_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_burden_of_proof
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    Well, in politics as opposed to a criminal trial there's no such thing as burdens of proof, just whether a scandal has legs. Among American (and British, Canadian etc) lawyers who advocate quantifying the concept of "reasonable doubt,"[1] the consensus figure seems to be that proof beyond a reasonable doubt means greater than 95% certainty (or, stated negatively, a less than 5% level of uncertainty). Judge Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York[2] puts the 95% number in his jury instructions, for example. If we assume the Bayesian prior that it's at least 19x more likely that Pakistani politicians at the highest level of influence are secretly corrupt and/or evading taxes, than it is that they're secretly tech nerds who eagerly download the latest Microsoft betas and try out all the new fonts, then we have met that 95% standard. If the accused were a Microsoft executive instead of an official of one of the world's most corrupt states,[3] the equation would be different. Of course, there might be other arguments for doubt besides "the font was available in obscure beta software." One potential argument is that it's a newer version of an older document that was typeset in a different font, which was changed to Calibri at some later point (recent MS Words might default to displaying the document in Calibri if it were sent to a computer that didn't have the original font installed, or the file type doesn't include font information in a way Word supports, or it was copied and pasted from the clipboard). [1] Which IMO it should be; most of the clear miscarriages of justice in either direction that I know of seem like they could have been prevented or at least been mistrials if, as much as possible, we'd nudged the jury to carefully quantify the strength of both sides' evidence instead of voting emotionally. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_B._Weinstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_B._Weinstein [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index