I guess you mean offical legal documents or something, but your sentence doesn't say that or mention those so it comes across in a very confusing way (it implies that using Word is illegal because every time you type something you alter your document)
this tool coming out on the heels of the DOJ releasing a trove of redacted documents doesn't come across as coincidental to me. let's think about this for a bit longer from that idea of using this on legal evidence...why would doctoring a legal document be prohibited?
For all we know, Epstein could have punished Trump and made him write "I'm a little bitch boy" 2,000 times and it took up 119 pages so every line got redacted. /madlibs
why unredact, rather than just edit the pdf to remove the redaction box and insert whatever you want? presumably you'd want a viewer to see that you modified a redaction, but why?
The point is you can perform a box dimension attack.
If you have a known input, you can match all outputs.
Example: Document that DOJ took down and reuploaded that redacted Trump's name when it was previously available. They used the same size boxes in each location.
You cannot do this with handwriting, but fonts have known widths.
In some redacted documents, there is even an alphabetical word index at the end with a list of pages on which the words appear.
The redacted words are also redacted in the word index, but the alphabetically preceding and succeeding words are visible, as is the number of index lines taken up by the redacted word's entry, which correlates with the number of appearances of that word.
This seems like rather useful information to constrain a search by such a tool.
I was thinking something similar. I wonder if the font uses kerning, and you know the rendering engine and the algorithm for how the text was blocked, if you can get exact text back even. Or, at a minimum, rule out words based on the available information. Not a field I am familiar with but I bet there are a lot of ways to uncover the redacted values.
Does it even matter? The kind of people who see stuff like this and are still fine with it are likely fine with anything else thats discovered as well.
Redactle.net has something similar where you can double-click or tap-hold then type a note over the redacted word.
what exactly does this mean? misrepresenting the altered document as unaltered?
i cant imagine it being illegal to do madlibs
It must be accurate. Even that being said, you still shouldn't reupload your altered document anywhere.
Standard CYA procedure
For all we know, Epstein could have punished Trump and made him write "I'm a little bitch boy" 2,000 times and it took up 119 pages so every line got redacted. /madlibs
If you have a known input, you can match all outputs.
Example: Document that DOJ took down and reuploaded that redacted Trump's name when it was previously available. They used the same size boxes in each location.
You cannot do this with handwriting, but fonts have known widths.
You'd never be blase about the same information about your password.
Plus with redaction there's a pretty small number of posible words when the boxes are small.
For instance, this file says Mona if you remove the top layer https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000136...
Some others I've seen include 1-3 more letters than are in the redaction.
The redacted words are also redacted in the word index, but the alphabetically preceding and succeeding words are visible, as is the number of index lines taken up by the redacted word's entry, which correlates with the number of appearances of that word.
This seems like rather useful information to constrain a search by such a tool.
Seems silly not to use a mono space font in these cases.
The truth has become irrelevant.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000250...
This doesn't remove redactions, it lets you write over them.