4 ms·

The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the reda

by pwg 10mo ago

The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the vein of the Arthur C Clarke quote of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"). To the journalist, it looks like "hackers at work" because the result looks like magic. Therefore their editor attaching "hacks" to the title for additional clickbait as well. To us technical people, who understand the concept of layers in digital editing, it is no big deal at all (and is not surprising that some percentage of the PDF's have been processed this way).

seba_dos1 10mo ago
It's not a hard technical concept to grasp that placing a stick-it onto some thing doesn't make the thing behind it disappear.
- pwg 10mo ago
  No, it is not. But given the abysmal lack of technical knowledge of the "typical computer user" they don't see the redacted PDF's as "having black stick-it notes stuck on top of the text". They see the PDF as having had a "black marker pen" applied that has obliterated the text from view. When someone then shows them how to copy/paste out the original text, because the PDF was simply black stick-it notes above the text, it appears to them as if that someone is a magical wizard of infinite intelligence.
sallveburrpi 10mo ago
I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here. It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this… You can find out the technical details in one quick search. How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
- Fricken 10mo ago
  >some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file. That's the first sentence of the article, and that's all there is to it.
- kiba 10mo ago
  To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic. Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".
  - phantasmish 10mo ago
    I can assure you that plenty of people who were using computers before smartphones, and who have used them every day at work for decades, also do not grasp what we could consider the very basics of file management.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
      I think.. the way to understand it is: levels. After all, files as the abstractions work with are not exactly there in the form of files in a cabinet. In a sense, even names are made made up fiction, BUT.. a helpful one.
  - p-e-w 10mo ago
    > To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic. I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      So I don't know your specialty, but I'm going to make a wild guess and assume that it isn't stage magic. State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal. To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious. To the general public… a significant percentage have problems with paged results and scroll bars. Including my dad, who developed military IFF simulation software before he retired, and then spent several years of retirement using Google before realising it gave more than three results at a time. Would he, with experience working with the military, have made this soecific mistake about redaction? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the level of ignorance was well within his range. (I'm not better, it's just my ignorance is e.g. setting fire to resistors). *Our* "common sense" isn't universal.
skeltoac 10mo ago
The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.
- pwg 10mo ago
  As far as creating a click bait title, yep, the editor knows what they are doing, and most likely picked the word for the click bait factor. But I'd also bet the editors technical knowledge of how this "revelation" of the hidden material really works is low enough that it also appears to be magic to them as well. So they likely think it is a 'hack' as well.
- streetnoodles 10mo ago
  I seriously doubt the journalist doesn’t understand exactly how this “hack” worked too. Right in the first paragraph, “simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.” A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…
  - Melatonic 10mo ago
    Agreed - not sure why so many are being so critical here. They probably didn't write the title and for better or worse "hack" has now become a common word casually used by many to mean "workflow trick" or similar.
seg_lol 10mo ago
> The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge ... You are supposing. The article doesn't read like that at all. Your post smells of exceptional tech elitism.
SilasX 10mo ago
This. Similar issue if you introduce someone to how you can "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. They're like "omg haxors!" True story: one time I used that technique to ask for a higher credit card limit than the options the website presented. Interestingly enough, they handled it gracefully by sending me a rejection for a higher amount and an acceptance for the maximum offered amount (the one I edited). And I didn't get arrested for hacking!
- sillyfluke 10mo ago
  > "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. Yes, but you see it says "view source" not "edit page live". Don't really see why it wouldn't be "omg" for them.
- sebastiennight 10mo ago
  I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images. They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar). The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later
- tomjakubowski 10mo ago
  Using view-source to accomplish something could be considered hacking in the old school MIT sense* of curious exploration of some place or thing for clever purposes. *: disclaimer, I didn't attend MIT, but did hang out with greybeards on 90s IRC
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
bird0861 10mo ago
Typical quality of The Guardian unfortunately. Don't read their energy reporting if you're at all literate about any of those topics. Any time they do a story on fusion I just about have an embolism.

by pwg 10mo ago

seba_dos1 10mo ago

It's not a hard technical concept to grasp that placing a stick-it onto some thing doesn't make the thing behind it disappear.

pwg 10mo ago
No, it is not. But given the abysmal lack of technical knowledge of the "typical computer user" they don't see the redacted PDF's as "having black stick-it notes stuck on top of the text". They see the PDF as having had a "black marker pen" applied that has obliterated the text from view. When someone then shows them how to copy/paste out the original text, because the PDF was simply black stick-it notes above the text, it appears to them as if that someone is a magical wizard of infinite intelligence.

sallveburrpi 10mo ago

I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here. It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this… You can find out the technical details in one quick search. How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.

Fricken 10mo ago
>some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file. That's the first sentence of the article, and that's all there is to it.
kiba 10mo ago
To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic. Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  I can assure you that plenty of people who were using computers before smartphones, and who have used them every day at work for decades, also do not grasp what we could consider the very basics of file management.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    I think.. the way to understand it is: levels. After all, files as the abstractions work with are not exactly there in the form of files in a cabinet. In a sense, even names are made made up fiction, BUT.. a helpful one.
- p-e-w 10mo ago
  > To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic. I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    So I don't know your specialty, but I'm going to make a wild guess and assume that it isn't stage magic. State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal. To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious. To the general public… a significant percentage have problems with paged results and scroll bars. Including my dad, who developed military IFF simulation software before he retired, and then spent several years of retirement using Google before realising it gave more than three results at a time. Would he, with experience working with the military, have made this soecific mistake about redaction? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the level of ignorance was well within his range. (I'm not better, it's just my ignorance is e.g. setting fire to resistors). *Our* "common sense" isn't universal.

skeltoac 10mo ago

The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.

pwg 10mo ago
As far as creating a click bait title, yep, the editor knows what they are doing, and most likely picked the word for the click bait factor. But I'd also bet the editors technical knowledge of how this "revelation" of the hidden material really works is low enough that it also appears to be magic to them as well. So they likely think it is a 'hack' as well.
streetnoodles 10mo ago
I seriously doubt the journalist doesn’t understand exactly how this “hack” worked too. Right in the first paragraph, “simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.” A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…
- Melatonic 10mo ago
  Agreed - not sure why so many are being so critical here. They probably didn't write the title and for better or worse "hack" has now become a common word casually used by many to mean "workflow trick" or similar.

seg_lol 10mo ago

> The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge ... You are supposing. The article doesn't read like that at all. Your post smells of exceptional tech elitism.

SilasX 10mo ago

This. Similar issue if you introduce someone to how you can "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. They're like "omg haxors!" True story: one time I used that technique to ask for a higher credit card limit than the options the website presented. Interestingly enough, they handled it gracefully by sending me a rejection for a higher amount and an acceptance for the maximum offered amount (the one I edited). And I didn't get arrested for hacking!

sillyfluke 10mo ago
> "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. Yes, but you see it says "view source" not "edit page live". Don't really see why it wouldn't be "omg" for them.
sebastiennight 10mo ago
I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images. They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar). The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later
tomjakubowski 10mo ago
Using view-source to accomplish something could be considered hacking in the old school MIT sense* of curious exploration of some place or thing for clever purposes. *: disclaimer, I didn't attend MIT, but did hang out with greybeards on 90s IRC

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

bird0861 10mo ago

Typical quality of The Guardian unfortunately. Don't read their energy reporting if you're at all literate about any of those topics. Any time they do a story on fusion I just about have an embolism.