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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!
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This works, right up until you introduce PDF compatible software that doesn't give a shit about your rules, of which there's plenty.
You can also print/scan, or even print to PDF to get around such limitations. The original document cannot be altered since that would invalidate the digital signature on the file, but you can create a perfect digital copy, omitting the signature, and modify it however you want.
If online systems that are skimming documents for their contents don't give a shit about what the signature is, and simply take a copy and OCR it to train an AI or amalgamate the information for data harvesting or other purposes.
I get what you're saying and in concept, it should be fine, the problem is that it's a software lock/restriction on a file type that isn't inherently closed source, unknown, nor was the PDF format built to be secure from the ground up. So we're applying security to a system that wasn't built for it.