• Space/Science
  • GeekSpeak
  • Mysteries of
    the Multiverse
  • Science Fiction
  • The Comestible Zone
  • Off-Topic
  • Community
  • Flame
  • CurrentEvents

Recent posts

The last of the Beats - Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) ER February 24, 2021 5:33 pm (Off-Topic)

Cosmic Particle Accelerator of Epic Proportions . . . DanS February 24, 2021 1:24 pm (Space/Science)

Distant 'Baby' Black Holes seem to be Misbehaving . . . DanS February 24, 2021 1:22 pm (Space/Science)

Fastest Spinning Black Hole -- so far . . . DanS February 24, 2021 1:13 pm (Space/Science)

Cosmologists Create 4,000 Virtual Universes to Solve Big Bang Mystery . . . DanS February 24, 2021 1:10 pm (Space/Science)

Willmann-Bell, RIP ER February 21, 2021 7:04 pm (Space/Science)

Good luck Perseverance! podrock February 18, 2021 12:34 pm (Space/Science)

Watch NASA Light a Fire on a Spaceship on Purpose. You Know, for Science . . . DanS February 18, 2021 10:22 am (Space/Science)

Could there be a Cluster of Antimatter Stars Orbiting Our Galaxy . . . ? DanS February 18, 2021 10:20 am (Space/Science)

Asteroid the Size of the Golden Gate Bridge will Whiz Past Earth in March . . . DanS February 18, 2021 10:18 am (Space/Science)

Earth's Mountains Disappeared for a Billion Years, and then Life Stopped Evolving . . . DanS February 18, 2021 10:16 am (Space/Science)

Home » GeekSpeak

Redaction Action August 10, 2018 9:31 am ER

Something interesting has arisen here in Florida concerning the Parkland shooting, although this post is not strictly about the shooting, but about a quirky consequence of our digital universe.

Apparently a long-awaited consultant’s report on the shooting was released publicly recently, but in order to comply with the shooter’s privacy considerations, large sections of it were redacted. That is, if you printed out the report, or brought up the file on your computer to read it, whole sections of it were “blacked out”, overprinted with a black stripe, impossible to read. Naturally, these are the parts journalists and the public were most interested in!

There was so little useful information in the report that one reporter did a “find” on the text to locate every mention of the shooter’s name. The find worked, even though it located those mentions even in paragraphs that had been blacked out! As it turns out, the redacted text was still in the file, it was only temporarily obscured by the text editor that the document was composed on, and later read with. The upshot was that the reporter simply copied the original, redacted document to another file with a different name and the opaque stripes disappeared, revealing the redacted text concealed beneath.

Whether this was a deliberate ploy by the publishers of the document, or a colossal error on their part, is irrelevant. Its still a good thing to know.

  • Manafort's lawyers just made the same mistake, and revealed more collusion... by RL 2019-01-08 23:16:06
    • There is no collusion. by ER 2019-01-09 08:33:23
    • Digital documents are dangerous that way by Robert 2018-08-10 11:20:45
      • Police are NOT hired for their IQ by RL 2018-08-10 10:04:28

        Search

        The Control Panel

        • Log in
        • Register