The blue sky post is locked without logging in. Here’s a alternative frontend
What’s insanely stupid about all of this is there’s no way that doge knew that those accounts were inactive. Their definition of inactive will have been, it hasn’t been used in 31 days. Since that’s an easy metric to pull up.
But so what? There are licenced applications that I use at work that are only used once every two to three months. There js stuff that I only need in January, February and March because it’s related to mitigating problems caused by poor weather conditions, outside of those months the weather is usually pretty mild.
So I guarantee that they caused a wave of IT support tickets a couple of weeks later from people that now needed to use the applications and had found that they had been there removed, without anyone talking to the relevant parties.
Why are govts using Adobe or anything made by the private sector is beyond me.
Does anyone know if there’s any open-source Linux software that does redactions just like Acrobat?
Edit: Thanks a lot for your suggestions! Will check them out later 🙂
https://github.com/digidigital/CoverUP
https://coverup.digidigital.de/
German made - cross-platform, and renders the new PDFs as images, not text, to make sure that you can’t read the redacted bits afterwards.
renders the new PDFs as images, not text, to make sure that you can’t read the redacted bits afterwards.
Wow what an advanced feature. Actually redacting things.
Not open source, but I use the free demo version of PDF-xchange for the most common editing tools. Highlight and draw boxes and comment etc.
It doesn’t actually matter what you use to edit it. The key to locking it down is simply to print to pdf as image instead of saving as pdf. I use the “Microsoft print to pdf printer” to do this. It’s in the printing dialogue.
The document is now a fixed picture. This will obviously also ruin the search feature.
Yeah, it’s called a print driver. You print the docs, redact to hell, and rescan them. That’s what they did during Trump 1. But there were actual competent people then. Now, only dumbass sycophants.
If DOGE really wanted to do something, they should have stopped all payments to Adobe and their ilk for anything with a suitable open source alternative. As it stands, everything they “saved” and more is going towards the record 1 trillion Pentagon budget that will never be audited. Guess they told Trump not to fuck with their blood money or the sniper won’t miss next time.
Actually there’s dozens of really good free / open source apps that can do that. Let’s face it, forgetting to flatten the edited version is not a technical problem. It’s a laziness one.
Or its malicious compliance
One of the few communities I miss on reddit…
Its still there but is a shadow of what it used to be. Lots of AI karma farming submissions.
It turned into a suspended disbelief creative writing exercise sub long before bots were it’s main problem. It was “I hate my Boss/Partner NoSleep”
More likely ignorance or incompetence instead of laziness
is sleep deprivation ignorance, incompetence or laziness?
More so on management’s end, but yes.
Yes
A lot of open source applications can’t be used by government agencies because the pedigree of the software can’t be verified, so you can’t be sure foreign entities didn’t add any code.
But really there’s a million ways to do this - even whatever application they used would have been fine if they simply printed out the redacted files and rescanned them.
Skill issue.
Yeah I’m not sure, but haven’t spent any time really looking through them. I’ve seen some images that were clearly scanned and the size reduced so you couldnt read words in the image you’d think they would have scanned the redacted files as well to the same PDF dump or whatever, which had they done would have flattened them. To me it seems more of a we “properly” redacted and covered up files for some people, and we didn’t care as much about others. Whether or not they were trying to allow for those people to be “accidentally” found is a possibility, but who knows
Could be sabotage
You mean screenshot and paint right?
Maybe someone intentionally poorly censored it. This problem is so easy to avoid.
Yeah, but you need to onboard those and run them through IT due dilligence. That is annoying in the best companies - i would not want to procure a new Software tool in a gouvernement setting.
It’s unpleasant to get any software approved in the government
Jesus. I’ve administrated a bunch of Adobe accounts in various ways and it’s not always straight forward to tell what licenses are in use and by whom. These pencil necked fucktards thought they somehow knew better than the government IT guys, what’s in use and what isn’t…
Incredible.
In any case, I’m glad their eating their own chow. They made this bed and now hopefully, they’re about to get fucked in it.
I somehow doubt it, but I can dream Harold.
I really don’t think these things are as connected as you want them to be.
Yeah it’s far more likely they were just incompetent. If I needed to redact a document I sure as hell wouldn’t be using acrobat to do it.
And frankly as much as I hate Elon and think DOGE was a farce, I’m not going to lament Adobe getting less government money
DOGE only existed to benefit Elon and his companies while also allowing for cover ups of any crimes he committed or his companies did by ending active outgoing investigations that were happening via gov’t agencies.
It seems it was little more than an excuse for Elon to go after the FAA, FCC, FTC, and EPA.
*Give SpaceX/Muskrat what it wants or your department will be gutted. *
Fake news. Adobe would never tell you if you’re paying for an “idle” account.
His face is so annoying to look at
It’s so punchable.
It’s annoying because it’s frustratingly unpunched
Pedophiles can’t redact pdf files?
I thought Leon was good at computer…
Tbf, I feel like this ain’t why the government failed at redactions, but the the thought of it being true is very amusing.
First thing to be thankful of proprietary software for?
Your skyview.social link returns “invalid url” for me.
