fluffy @fluffy@queer.party

So hey just a request:

if I say something that you know to be untrue or that contradicted something else I said previously, please let me know so that I can reconcile things and disentangle things that are true from things I only wish were true.

I don't want to be an unreliable narrator, and I don't want to fall into some very bad habits and patterns that have been ingrained to me all my life.

I want to be better than that.

Thanks. 💜

Oops I lost my old #introductions post in the last instance fandango but enough has changed I'd might as well make a new one right?

Hi, I'm fluffy! I'm a software engineer by day (working at an HIV research lab as of December, 2018) and in my spare time I make music, games, comics, and bad decisions.

See my bio for various links!

Also http://beesbuzz.biz/about for a somewhat fuller bio I guess.

Me: hmm I shouldn’t do karaoke tonight, I need to go to bed at a reasonable time and preserve my spoons

Also me: (stays up even later trying to tweak some stuff on my twitch stream setup)

irony: needing to complete a bunch of Disqus CAPTCHAs to mark a spam comment on my website as spam

I suppose if I were feeling particularly snarky the alt text could have read (apologies to anyone who tries using a screen reader on this toot):

🅷🅰🆁🅼⬛︎🆃🅾⬛︎🅾🅽🅶🅾🅸🅽🅶⬛︎🅼🅰🆃🆃🅴🆁⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎⬛︎

but that kind of defeats the purpose.

The most interesting thing I can find in the redaction is starting on PDF page 28 (numbered page 20) it looks like they need a new imaging drum.

also I can't believe I just redrafted this one to add alt text but that's how much I care about a11y.

Here's an image of the noise floor of page 24. To my eye this just looks like what you get if you ask a laser printer to print out solid black, which is to say there's no information to be recovered from the noise since it was never sent to the printer in the first place.

Well, insofar as I am able to determine from the PDF. The standards at the time also required that any redacted document be followed up by multiple prints of random/blank pages to ensure that the imaging drum didn't have any residual image on it. But that's only even relevant with physical access to the specific device immediately after the pre-redacted version was printed. Definitely not an attack surface for a PDF.

That said, someone smarter than me about this might know something I haven't considered, but like: back in the 90s I had a government clearance for an internship I had at a Department of Energy lab (it wasn't anything even remotely exciting/interesting beyond getting to play with a beta of Windows '95) and I had to learn about sensitive document redaction policy. The Mueller report was redacted to what I recall of those standards.

Image-based attacks on the redacted information won't be able to get anything either; there's no wordforms/letterforms to draw from, the text is fully-justified and the spans are *huge*, so any text that could possibly fit the constraints would have absolutely no verifiability and there's practically infinite strings of English text that would fit the criteria.

Basically they followed proper government practices in information redaction; most likely they redacted the information at the image level, then printed it out and then scanned it back in just to be safe.

The metadata doesn't even include a serial number for the scanner itself; there's UUIDs for the scan but that itself doesn't tell you anything useful.

On one of my Slacks some folks were speculating about how much juicy metadata was leaked by the redacted Muller report. While I'm not a professional at this, from what I can tell the answer is: not much.

• the PDF is a series of images where all redacted text is blacked out at the line/paragraph level and covered in random noise
• the only PDF metadata I can find are that it is a PDF from April 17 produced by a common model of Ricoh copier-scanner-printer

Doing some music work streaming with my new setup! http://twitch.tv/fluffycritter

New post: Plaidophile: Progress resumed? https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/3287-Progress-resumed

Bad game idea: "Are You Docent?" - you are living in a museum and need to get cleaned and dressed without being spotted by the other volunteers

New post: Plaidophile: Studio inventory https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/6186-Studio-inventory

One of these days I'll remember to add a summary tag *before* my post goes live and gets bridgy fed'ed.

New post: General Articles: My streaming setup https://beesbuzz.biz/articles/5442-My-streaming-setup