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Entry tags:
File Insecurity
Possibly I'm the only person in the world who will find this amusing, but that's okay.
Part of what I do involves helping people out with all sorts of odd computer issues. There's one issue that has come up a few times; somewhere along the way I came up with a pretty amusing workaround.
It's a matter of file security. At times I need to get a copy of some of the Adobe Acrobat files on our intranet. Problem: the files have been heavily secured. Copying is not allowed, saving is not allowed, so there's no way to get a copy of the file - right? All secure.
Well, of course, not really. One thing that could be done is to view the PDF and take snapshots of each section with PrintScrn, assembling them into a single JPG with a program like Paint Shop Pro; but that's not really efficient. It takes time (quite a bit of time for large documents), and you lose the text search/recognition option of a PDF. You lose the easy scalability, too.
So...I open the PDF in question and print it. To Acrobat Distiller, or the PDFwriter. Result: a perfect PDF copy, missing only the index (if any) and file properties (which are easily replaced, if they're needed at all).
I don't know why that amuses me...I guess because it shows how useless the security settings are. Everyone on the intranet has the full Acrobat installation, so every one of them could do the exact same thing.
Part of what I do involves helping people out with all sorts of odd computer issues. There's one issue that has come up a few times; somewhere along the way I came up with a pretty amusing workaround.
It's a matter of file security. At times I need to get a copy of some of the Adobe Acrobat files on our intranet. Problem: the files have been heavily secured. Copying is not allowed, saving is not allowed, so there's no way to get a copy of the file - right? All secure.
Well, of course, not really. One thing that could be done is to view the PDF and take snapshots of each section with PrintScrn, assembling them into a single JPG with a program like Paint Shop Pro; but that's not really efficient. It takes time (quite a bit of time for large documents), and you lose the text search/recognition option of a PDF. You lose the easy scalability, too.
So...I open the PDF in question and print it. To Acrobat Distiller, or the PDFwriter. Result: a perfect PDF copy, missing only the index (if any) and file properties (which are easily replaced, if they're needed at all).
I don't know why that amuses me...I guess because it shows how useless the security settings are. Everyone on the intranet has the full Acrobat installation, so every one of them could do the exact same thing.
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(Anonymous) 2003-10-14 09:59 am (UTC)(link)I'm betting it to keep stupid people who are dishonest from abusing the data...the smart ones, well that's the challange isn't it.
BTW until I read Peter's post it would have worked on me. None to bright my pappy always said about me...
Wayde, esq.
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I recently bought a game (Temple of Elemental Evil). I have tried everything to get it to run on my PC, and it just won't. Installs fine, but when I try to run it, after briefly turning the mouse pointer into a disk icon and back, nothing happens. After checking out the message boards for the game it is most likely a SecuRom bug. SecuRom is a CD copy protection scheme commonly used that, supposedly, prevents people from pirating games, but actually prevents legitimate users from running games.