What is Digg?55 Comments
- quasipalm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+37On the part of Google? So now it's Google's job to protect Adobe's crappy DRM?
- joel2600, on 10/12/2007, -3/+39if you know people who would be that concerned over this, please make sure we never hang out in real life.
there are a million ways to circumvent this DRM, so adding one more method to the madness should not make anyone's head explode. unless they were paraniod and ignorant to the other circumvention methods out there.
Google might have made a mistake in this case, but it's not a big deal because this sort of thing is easily remedied.
I wouldn't call this egregious either.... AT&T siphoning all of their traffic through the NSA violating the constitution as well as a slew of other laws ... that's egregious - joel2600, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14sorry for posting up top
UPDATE:
before this article even made the front page, users on the site that this article is linking to were reporting that google had essentially "fixed" the problem.
for those of you who do not have access to this article or a copy, essentially the flaw revolved around the scenario of one user sending another an e-mail with a pdf attachment. The gmail interface would then allow the user the ability to be able to "View as HTML". This would allow the user to copy and paste the contents of the document, thereby circumventing the DRM on the original document (if there were any).
Google's regular search does make this distinction and will not display DRM enabled PDFs as HTML, and does not even give you this option. Users trying to duplicate this were finding that google had already started to take action, and when you sent a DRM enabled PDF through e-mail, users were still seeing the "Display as HTML" link on their screen, but they could not properly display the contents of the DRM PDFs anymore, essentially giving them little or no information about the contents.
So for now, this appears to be fixed. Still interesting conversation though. (Sorry for the duplicate post, i'm not sure how that happened like that) - allthewhile, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13Wordpress is highly optimized. It's the SERVERS that can't handle digg's load. When you see a car crash on the side of the road, do you blame HONDA? Do you blame FORD? No, you blame the driver who didn't handle the thing properly.
Again, the "crashing" has nothing to do with wordpress. It's just that there are so many people out there who use wordpress because it's free, easy, cheap, and HIGHLY OPTIMIZED. The reason why you see it "crashing" is that it gives you a nice error message when the SERVER can't handle the load.
I thought we've been over this already. - kimos, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14I might just be an oaf, but I have no idea what WordPress is. The only time I ever see it is the WordPress error of sites that get dugg waayyyy too fast. *shrug*
- BillyBlaze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Heh, using recent KPDF (an open source PDF viewer), there's a checkbox in the preferences dialog for "Obey DRM restrictions." (The default was checked.) It wouldn't get around password protections, but it will let you copy out of or print PDFs you otherwise couldn't. There's a compile-time option to disable it, so probably some distros do, but not Gentoo at least. Calling it DRM is actually a stretch, it's just a flag in the file that says "please don't do this," but there's no reason anyone needs to obey. Of course, it's probably against the DMCA for me to have said any of this.
- Strat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Well to add an easy way if your on a mac just open the pdf in ColorSync and save it and Vola! No more DRM or any sort.
- info, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/18/use_gmail_to_break_p.html
- Strahd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5So, since gmail breaks some form of DRM it is now illegal under the DMCA - along with magic markers and sticky notes (which could be used to break early CD copy protections.)
- iWorks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4was just going to post this method... but keep it quiet mkay... don't want this little workaround "fixed"
- kimos, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Uhh... Not blogging....?
I looked it up. I didn't REALLY need an answer to that, it was more that the only thing I ever learned about it is that it crashes. Often. - GravyTrain6, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4diggs are climbing, but the page can't be viewed? that's frustrating
- fusioned, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4If it's from BoingBoing, link to them.
- Strangers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3there's a handy firefox extension called 'pdf download', that allows you view pdfs as html files, making copying easy.
- ComputerGuru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2http://www.neosmart.net/forums/index.php?gettopic=14&p=1#20
- ComputerGuru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2http://www.neosmart.net/forums/index.php?gettopic=14&p=1#20
- sarcoma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Use Gmail to break PDF copy-restrictions
Andreas sez, "Gmail's 'View as HTML' functionality allows you to view a wide range of attachments inside your browser - it seems like it doesn't respect the copying restrictions defined inside PDF files, allowing you to copy or print them without any problem (some conversion related layout issues aside)." Link (Thanks, Andreas!)
That's all they have on it - betasp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Anyone got a mirror?
- Latka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2To remove drm on Xpdf under Linux, guess which lines you must comment in the source code.
Hint:
// check for copy permission
if (!doc->okToCopy()) {
error(-1, "Copying of images from this document is not allowed.");
exitCode = 3;
goto err1;
} - Nougat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Why not just open the PDF with Adobe Reader, then print it to PDF with CutePDF Writer?
- redguy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1as far as I know, you can find the same tools Google (therefore Gmail) uses for documents conversion into HTML in Google Desktop's search install folder. just look for those ;).
- soogy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Is "egregious" the word of the day or something?
- mercano, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"On the part of Google? So now it's Google's job to protect Adobe's crappy DRM?"
Yes. If Google is licensing Adobe code to read these things, then yes, there is probalby a clause somewhere where Google must honor the no copy flag. If Google is getting through Adobe's DRM without a contract, then its just a plain DMCA violation. - ScoTTeh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My mum had some PDF documents she wanted to send to people, but didnt want them to be able to print/edit them. She asked me to find out how secure they were and if it was possible to get around the password 'encryption' they used. Needless to say it took me about 5 minutes on google and 3 different programs (2 being alternative PDF editors and the other, the one that worked was something like 'advanced pdf password cracker') until i found one that worked in seconds.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1try this link http://akira.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/andreas/blog/archives/2006/04/circumvent-pdf-drm-with-gmail.html i couldnt find the link mentioned in the email tho
- Atomic1fire, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1and you wonder why riaa/mpaa sues people
- dognose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I can read that pdf prefectly in xpdf.
- Darrelc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Allthewhile:
Server = Hardware
Wordpress = Software.
Car = Hardware
Driver = "Software"
So your analogy is a bit flawed but I see what you mean. But surely the wordpress software must be a bit server heavy if its only serving up text and maybe a few images and thats enough to crash the server. - cbbspike, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I just tested this today, and it seems that someone closed this crack
- ComputerGuru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Managed to grab the file, copied the text to my server:
http://www.neosmart.net/forums/index.php?gettopic=14&p=1#20 - jurand, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Exactly! This would do the job precisely!
- elmigs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2simple:
$pdf2ps file.pdf
$ps2pdf file.ps - nanboya, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Does the same hold true for encrypted PDFs?
- Snuffkin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2If it is highly optimized, then why is there a use for Lightpress?
http://lightpress.org/
"I started this project because, even though WordPress is easy to install and has plenty of features, it has a couple of serious drawbacks for a non-casual user: it's slow, its queries are suboptimized, and its code has no clear distinction between program logic and layout, making customization very boring and time-consuming." - kriskr0s, on 08/11/2008, -0/+0http://www.locklizard.com
- Barnstormer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1OK, assuming I run nix/nux and bring it up in xPDF, can you copy the contents to, say, OpenOffice with fully readable results? I think you need to extract the font and install it.
And unfortunately, I'm Win-bound and need a solution for XP. Go ahead, stone me, I deserve it. - Barnstormer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Scratch that - I was editing it when the timer expired.
I found the xPDF windows port at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
and will check it out. I still think I'll need to find some way of extracting the font definition and making an installable font if I'm going to be able to export the contents to another app with readable results. - windhawk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Here's how I do it: Take screen captures of each page of the PDF. Save the captures as large TIFF images. Feed each TIFF image to an OCR package. And viola! Editable text. This works great if your time is is worth less than your money. LOL.
- techferret, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Same here....anyone has the mirror? It has its uses and it would be nice to know.
- Archer007, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0confirmed, the gmail method no longer works :(((
- kriskr0s, on 05/15/2008, -0/+0Tried this with a locklizard document. no good, not having much luck trying to get past this security
- twisterX, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Ill mirror it if i could get to the page
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1huh. i discovered this quite a while ago. i thought it had long since been found out.
- Barnstormer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Something that's been on my wish list for a while is to be able to install on my system a custom font that the Daily Racing Form uses for it's charts and programs. In this font track and month abbreviations have their own character symbols, superscripted numbers have non-standard codes, etc.
There's a sample PDF at http://www.brisnet.com/samples/hol1202u.pdf
I imagine that the font in question is embedded in the PDF, but can it be extracted and installed so that copying and pasting into another application gives readable text instead of font-substituted gibberish?
Any ideas would be most welcome. - tlogank, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0seems your mirror has been dugg now, too!
- eth3l, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Nice little political blast there.
I think it would be egregious to not spy on intercontinental conversations between known terrorists. but hey, thats just me.
Doesn't Google searches alone provide this capability? - thedonquixote, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0@BloodJunkie
- You is teh ghey. - gothamcityprjct, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1This is news that you can open a PDF as HTML with GMail? Yawn.
- tahim, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0you been dugg
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