

LifeLock Asks New Times to Alter Published Police Report - tshtf
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/valleyfever/2010/05/lifelock_worries_about_employe.php

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amalcon
_Copying the PDF document and pasting into a Microsoft Word document allowed
all the redacted information to magically appear._

This is a great example of metaphor failure. If you take a black permanent
marker and color over writing on a piece of paper, you're doing a pretty good
job of destroying that information. If you draw a black box over some writing
in a PDF, you're leaving the data completely intact.

If a software product uses a metaphor for some real-world object, anywhere it
acts differently from that object will be confusing.

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teilo
In the printing industry, I see this sort of thing all the time. People assume
that drawing a white or black box on top of something makes it go away just
because it doesn't print out on a piece of paper.

My other favorite one is putting a huge image in a crop box to use just a
small part of the image, and then complaining that their PDF is still so huge,
because, you know, they cropped it so it should be smaller. They seldom
believe me when I tell them that the whole image is still there, until I show
them by uncropping it inside Acrobat.

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zach
Man oh man, someone needs to start a PDF redaction startup. Every one of these
stories could be a press hit for your company.

In fact, you could publish a PDF where you have your CEO declare "my Social
Security number is [redacted]" to play off this.

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larrywright
Did anyone else find it odd that there was an advertisement for Lifelock right
there on that page?

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TallGuyShort
It doesn't link anywhere, so my bet is it's not an ad - it's merely a graphic
for the article.

