Yes, this is at best a project for trolling, and it is getting voted on because people naively think it has some useful applications regarding the Epstein documents. It does not.
why unredact, rather than just edit the pdf to remove the redaction box and insert whatever you want? presumably you'd want a viewer to see that you modified a redaction, but why?
The point is you can perform a box dimension attack.
If you have a known input, you can match all outputs.
Example: Document that DOJ took down and reuploaded that redacted Trump's name when it was previously available. They used the same size boxes in each location.
You cannot do this with handwriting, but fonts have known widths.
I see another similar comment, but I have an explicit question. Does the following from the README hold any water at all, legally?
> I am not responsible for your use of this tool. ... By using this tool you claim all legal liability for any documents you create with it.
Without a detailed and carefully worded license, does this confer any protection whatsoever?
Having asked that, I'm not sure what protection would be needed. Could a victim of abuse of this tool (or similar) seek some sort of take-down of the tool? It seems unlikely but I'm curious about the scenario.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 32.7 ms ] threadwhat exactly does this mean? misrepresenting the altered document as unaltered?
i cant imagine it being illegal to do madlibs
Uh oh!
This doesn't remove redactions, it lets you write over them.
This is trash, IMO.
If you have a known input, you can match all outputs.
Example: Document that DOJ took down and reuploaded that redacted Trump's name when it was previously available. They used the same size boxes in each location.
You cannot do this with handwriting, but fonts have known widths.
For instance, this file says Mona if you remove the top layer https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000136...
Some others I've seen include 1-3 more letters than are in the redaction.
Redactle.net has something similar where you can double-click or tap-hold then type a note over the redacted word.
> I am not responsible for your use of this tool. ... By using this tool you claim all legal liability for any documents you create with it.
Without a detailed and carefully worded license, does this confer any protection whatsoever?
Having asked that, I'm not sure what protection would be needed. Could a victim of abuse of this tool (or similar) seek some sort of take-down of the tool? It seems unlikely but I'm curious about the scenario.
The redactions by DOJ are so sloppy that you can COPY AND PASTE blocks of text to a new text editor and see the "redacted" text beneath.
Try it yourself.
They did not properly redact many documents.
It's about to get wild.
It works now.