Comment by Arch-TK

>How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.

You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article.

Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.

It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age.

It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way.

They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs.

Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not enough money in what's left of that industry to do that anymore.

To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.

Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".

Most journalists are ex. English majors (or some other non-technical degree). I would not expect any (even the supposed tech. journalists) to understand the technology they report upon to the level that us here on HN understand that same technology.

Their job is to write coherent articles that gather views, not truly understand what it is they are writing about. That's why the Gell-Mann Amnesia [1] aspect so often crops up for any technical article (hint, it also crops up for every article, but we don't recognize the mistakes the journalist makes in the articles where we don't have the underlying knowledge to recognize the mistakes).

[1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

>some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.

That's the first sentence of the article, and that's all there is to it.

No, it is not. But given the abysmal lack of technical knowledge of the "typical computer user" they don't see the redacted PDF's as "having black stick-it notes stuck on top of the text". They see the PDF as having had a "black marker pen" applied that has obliterated the text from view.

When someone then shows them how to copy/paste out the original text, because the PDF was simply black stick-it notes above the text, it appears to them as if that someone is a magical wizard of infinite intelligence.

I seriously doubt the journalist doesn’t understand exactly how this “hack” worked too. Right in the first paragraph, “simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.”

A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…

As far as creating a click bait title, yep, the editor knows what they are doing, and most likely picked the word for the click bait factor.

But I'd also bet the editors technical knowledge of how this "revelation" of the hidden material really works is low enough that it also appears to be magic to them as well. So they likely think it is a 'hack' as well.

I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images.

They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar).

The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later

> "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website.

Yes, but you see it says "view source" not "edit page live". Don't really see why it wouldn't be "omg" for them.

Some peopledo things acknowledging that there may be backlash for an action when they feel it's the right thing to do.

Yes they may get fired, but it will be difficult to prove intent and very easy to claim incompetence.

So I don’t think there will be jail time if that’s what you’re referring to.

If you unlock a lock, that's still a lock.

Also, in light of everything that is happening, is incredible that the top comment on this thread is about some minor semantic definitions.

I think that doesn’t do the scenario justice. They tried to redact and did so in a way that looks visibly redacted (in screenshots many have seen) but can be uncovered.

If you say “they failed to redact data” to a layperson looking at a visibly redacted document they’re going to be confused.

They're likely viewing the electronic documents by analogy to photocopies with blacked out sections where there is nothing to distinguish the text from the redacting marks and nothing you can project out. They don't know the structure of the file format and how information in it is encoded or rendered, or even that there is a distinction between encoding and rendering.

(A better analogy might be the original physical document with redaction marks. If the text is printed using a laser printer or a type writer, and the marker used for redaction uses some other kind of ink - let's say one that doesn't dissolve the text's ink or toner in any way - then you can in principle distinguish between the two and thus recover visibility of the text.)

To be fair, I put partial blame on the advertisers. They've been claiming "AI" on their products on anything that has an algorithm basically for the past few years.