> - Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.
Compared to other formats this is actually relatively easy in a PDF since the way the text drawing operators work they don't influence the state for arbitrary other content. A lot of positioning in a PDF is absolute (or relative to an explicitly defined matrix which has hardcoded values). Usually this makes editing a PDF harder (since when changing text the related text does not adapt automatically), but when removing data it makes it much easier since you can mostly just delete it without affecting anything else. (There are exceptions for text immediately after the removed data, but that's limited and relatively easy to control.)
> - Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "๐ฎ". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement.
That's actually rather tricky in PDFs since they usually contain embedded subset fonts and these usually do not have "๐ฎ" as part of the subset. Also doing this would break the layout since "๐ฎ" has a different width than most letters in a typical font, so it would not lead to less formatting issues than the previous option. Unless the "๐ฎ" is stretched for each letter to have the same dimensions, but then the stretched characters allow to recover the text.
> The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
PDF does not have a concept of a background color. If it looks like a background color in PDF, you have a rectangle drawn in one color and something in the foreground color in front of it. What you usually see in badly redacted PDF files is exactly this, but in opposite color: Someone just draws a black box on top of the characters. You could argue that this is smarter since it would still work even if someone would chnage colors, but of course, PDF is a vector format. If you just add a rectangle, someone else can remove it again. (And also copy & paste doesn't care about your rectangle)
I'm somewhat disturbed by the idea that anyone would think that you shouldn't stop when "driving in even semi-dense traffic in any bigger city" if you can't see. Of course you should slowly come to a halt and put warning slights on to give people time to react, but not coming to a stop in such a situation seems at the very least highly negligent.
Sure, stopping in the middle of the road will be annoying to other drivers, but it's generally preferred to annoy people over killing them.
Do you drive a car and did such a situation happen to you, in situations I describe?
It did happen to me in dense traffic, there are few ways to mitigate it but stopping in multilane road for anything but a serious medical condition or car dying would be about weighting which risk is greater, this is not about annoying somebody but safety. If I had 0 visibility through windshield and nothing else helped, in lower speed I would pop my head out a bit for example (which would clear the windshield too).
But maybe you don't drive around many french drivers :) They run very aggressively with minimal gaps, and our roads (and parking spaces) are much narrower than US ones for example. You have to drive at the limit, whole crowd always does.
This is a step in that direction. What they are proposing is not so much "no bootloader" but using a small Linux as bootloader. I'm using a similar setup for some time and it gives some of these advantages. Especially you get support for all relevant filesystems (you can support everything Linux supports because it is Linux), it can dynamically build a minimal initramfs with only the needed drivers if you want to and understands module dependencies (e.g. it can just dump the list of modules it uses itself) and is generally much more flexible.
This often leads to extremely annoying codebase because languages trying to enforce styleguides without proper options just leads to inconsistency once any code in another language leads to the codebase.
Just have an options file which is checked in with the code and enforce whatever is set in there works much better. You still avoids all the useless discussions about formatting while also allowing to set sensible settings which are consistent with surrounding technology.
Technically no, you'd need to also deploy a NFT smart contract that creates a new token for each file. But theoretically any media type could be represented by an NFT so it's sort of an arbitrary restriction by NFT.storage. Probably not super enforceable on their part. I imagine the promo will end at some point though. Filecoin just happens to have an excess of available storage right now, which is why they can afford to offer it for free.
Regarding 2.: Most of these objects do not directly correspond to rendered elements. Basically every page has one (typically) content stream which will contain all rendered elements. The biggest rendered thing you see outside of that are annotations (link boxes, form fields, actual annotations, ...).
It's a bit different if you are looking at a tagged PDF, where the tagging structure is in there, but if you want to look at that in detail you are probably better served with e.g. ngPDF (https://ngpdf.com/) which will show the tagging structure including the mapping to rendered elements.
While there is a glyph like that there's no nice way to access it. There is no font feature to enable slashedzero by default and slashedzero is not mapped to U+0030 U+FE00 (Unicode's standard variant for an explicit slashed zero). Instead it's only accessible using the private use codepoint U+E007 and then typically doesn't get copied as a regular zero.
But more generally the font has an empty GSUB table which would be used for such substitutions. I'm wondering if the cockpit display maybe misses support for that and that's why they tried not to use it for anything.
APCA works great, but it has a very weird and restrictive license. Before you consider it for anything you should probably take a detailed look at that and consider if it's really usable for you.
I am sorry about the licensing issue, it is only temporary during the public beta. And I am providing some exceptions, if you need, send an email to legal@myndex.com
Just can't do an MIT type license right nowโand really there's no generic one that really suit what we need right now, so we're working on such a license, one that is reasonably permissive yet prevents some of the issues we've run into. I.e. like with bad actors incorrectly modifying, or reverse engineering and doing so wrongly, or taking it to the cantina at Mos Eisley...
There's no need to appeal yet. With "punishment order" they probably refer to a german "Strafbefehl" which isn't a full sentence but a simplified system to avoid trials which only requires a bit more than probable cause.
They can now object to it, then there will be a full trial. If they loose there, then they can appeal.
> - Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.
Compared to other formats this is actually relatively easy in a PDF since the way the text drawing operators work they don't influence the state for arbitrary other content. A lot of positioning in a PDF is absolute (or relative to an explicitly defined matrix which has hardcoded values). Usually this makes editing a PDF harder (since when changing text the related text does not adapt automatically), but when removing data it makes it much easier since you can mostly just delete it without affecting anything else. (There are exceptions for text immediately after the removed data, but that's limited and relatively easy to control.)
> - Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "๐ฎ". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement.
That's actually rather tricky in PDFs since they usually contain embedded subset fonts and these usually do not have "๐ฎ" as part of the subset. Also doing this would break the layout since "๐ฎ" has a different width than most letters in a typical font, so it would not lead to less formatting issues than the previous option. Unless the "๐ฎ" is stretched for each letter to have the same dimensions, but then the stretched characters allow to recover the text.
> The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
PDF does not have a concept of a background color. If it looks like a background color in PDF, you have a rectangle drawn in one color and something in the foreground color in front of it. What you usually see in badly redacted PDF files is exactly this, but in opposite color: Someone just draws a black box on top of the characters. You could argue that this is smarter since it would still work even if someone would chnage colors, but of course, PDF is a vector format. If you just add a rectangle, someone else can remove it again. (And also copy & paste doesn't care about your rectangle)