Comment by afavour 3 hours ago
You’re absolutely correct but I think your comment also highlights something important: we don’t have a good word to represent what it is
Unfortunately “hack” became a catch all word long ago. Just look at “life hacks”.
There's nothing else to say about this. Also, your comment is nested even deeper within the same semantic squabbling, so it's odd that you think that it's a waste of time in light of more important things that you are also not talking about.
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.)
How about "the documents were clarified" or "their contents were revealed"? Maybe "formatted for reading on your device"?
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.
> You’re absolutely correct
They are not. They are factually incorrect. Look up the various definitions of redacted. They fit perfect for the title. Arguing otherwise suggests you are making up definitions and words, in which case, I am still correct.
They failed to redact data. That's it. People just read the files afterwards, only formatting was wierd.