The buy generic cialis online widespread rumors about this fictitious disease indicate that people are tablet augmentin not receiving enough sex education. If the diagnosis is uncertain, cheap prozac from uk a person's response to Parkinson's disease medications may reveal more, compare viagra prices as people with MSA typically do not experience long-term benefits cipro discount from them. Equitable distribution is more complex, and it can buy viagra us be hard to visualize what it actually means in practice. buy clozapine online The cauda equina is a group of nerves and nerve discount compazine roots that stems from the lower end of the spinal flovent sale cord and helps control the bladder. This is because some lowest price viagra people may assume that those less able to afford food due.

It was reported last week (see the Crimson story, for example) that the amount for which Facebook settled the litigation brought against it by the Winklevosses, two of Mark Zuckerberg’s contemporaries at Harvard, was $65M. That number was supposed to be secret, but Facebook’s former lawyers released it by accident. How?

Turns out, exactly the same way the details of the Calipari report, discussed at the beginning of Chapter 3, became public. The law firm “redacted” the number from a document it then made public, but it did the redaction simply by placing a white bar over it in the PDF file. The actually $65M number was still in the file.

You can do it yourself — it takes only a few seconds — try it, it’s fun! Click on this link to download and open the PDF of the court transcript as redacted and released. Go to the bottom of page 22, where there is some white space preceded by the word “[REDACTED].” Select the white space (it runs from the last part of one line to the first part of the next) and copy it — as though you were just copying a bunch of spaces. Now paste it into any word processor — bingo, like magic, the words “$65 MILLION” appear. They were there all along, covered by the white redaction bar — probably just “highlighting” applied using Adobe Acrobat or some similar tool, with the highlighter color changed to white.

In Blown to Bits we give two other examples of this mistake, in addition to the Calipari report. You would think that law firms would understand this by now! There are easy ways to avoid it. Oh dear — if it was some poor unsupervised paralegal or staffperson who did it, I feel sorry for him or her. But really, there can be no excuse for the firm.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Secrecy and encryption, Security, Social computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.