Comments on: Exposing poorly redacted PDFs

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:46:29 +0000

The folks over at Atalasoft made a .NET SDK to make redacting easy on the web. It basically uses a black rectangle annotation and you can program it to make a flattened image-only PDF out of it.
http://www.atalasoft.com/ajaxannotations/

By: Roy Brookes

Roy Brookes — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 05:08:43 +0000

http://www.rapidredact.com

By: Roy Brookes

Roy Brookes — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 05:07:53 +0000

There is redaction software that will remove sensitive information permanently from the electronic document, http://www.rapidredact.com
is one such product.

By: David

David — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:26:52 +0000

Lol, it’s even easier on Ubuntu. With the eVince document viewer, a preloaded app, all you have to do is highlight over the black boxes and it shows the text underneath.

By: John

John — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 01:18:47 +0000

http://omghax.ca/download.php?file=googleexecutive-mod.pdf
I modified the PDF with Illustrator for your reading pleasure :)

By: jeicrash

jeicrash — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:34:38 +0000

YAWN! Why not just re-edit the pdf and delete the information you don't want shown?

Too many people are complaining about google earth. Its no more info then what someone would get by driving by your house themselves. "Private drives", HA, one trip to the local court house and you can get blue-prints of anyones house. So what good is a private drive?

By: Dirwin517

Dirwin517 — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 20:24:34 +0000

did anyone think mayb that was googles point, ther tryin to prove thers no such thing as true privacy and low and behold its realy easy to c wat they hid in that pdf, idk thats what i thought

By: localroger

localroger — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:41:58 +0000

matt, you can do it completely digitally. the key is to convert to a pure graphic image and add the boxes with a graphic editor. there are a number of free pseudo print drivers that will output .bmp, edit with mspaint or whatever, and paste into adobe or even openoffice which will then be unaware that the image contains text at all.

By: Janne

Janne — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:35:35 +0000

To remove the black boxes, just upen the PDF in Adobe Illustrator och delete the boxes.

By: RED_404

RED_404 — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:57:04 +0000

Or in acrobat9 pro click Document/Examine Document
then a new sidebar will open in that expand Hidden text and click show preview
I think you can figure out the rest

By: BigD145

BigD145 — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:43:05 +0000

You can also use PDF Download for Firefox and open a PDF as HTML.

By: Stan

Stan — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:27:59 +0000

that will only work if the redaction was done in acrobat 8, acrobat 9 fixed that.

By: matt

matt — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:10:58 +0000

isn't the most secure way to redact a document the following?

a) print it out. (on a printer without the yellow dot tracking feature)
b) cut out the parts you don't want anyone to see.
c) scan it back in.

looks like National Legal and Policy Center didn't want everyone to know the google exec's home address.

ooopsy