Does pdfinfo give any indication of the application used to create the document?

Oracle Documaker PDF Driver
PDF version: 1.3

If it chokes on the Java bit up front, can you extract just the PDF from the file and look at that?

Not sure how to do that but I did just try pdfimages -all which was not useful since it’s a vector PDF. pdfdetach -list shows 0 attachments. It just occurred to me that pdftocairo could be useful as far as a CLI way to neuter the doc and make it useable, but that’s a kind of a lossy meat-grinder option that doesn’t help with analysis.

You might also dig through the PDF a bit using Dider Stevens 's Tools,

Thanks for the tip. I might have to look into that. No readme… I guess this is a /use the source, Luke/ scenario. (edit: found this).

I appreciate all the tips. I might be tempted to dig into some of those options.

Your assertion that the document is malicious without any evidence is what I’m concerned about.

I did not assert malice. I asked questions. I’m open to evidence proving or disproving malice.

At some point you have to decide to trust someone. The comment above gave you reason to trust that the document was in a standard, non-malicious format. But you outright rejected their advice in a hostile tone. You base your hostility on a youtube video.

There was too much uncertainty there to inspire trust. Getoffmylan had no idea why the data was organised as serialised java.

You should read the essay “on trusting trust” and then make a decision on whether you are going to participate in digital society or live under a bridge with a tinfoil hat.

I’ll need a more direct reference because that phrase gives copious references. Do you mean this study? Judging from the abstract:

To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.

I seem to have received software pretending to be a document. Trust would naturally not be a sensible reaction to that. In the infosec discipline we would be incompetent fools to loosely trust whatever comes at us. We make it a point to avoid trust and when trust cannot be avoided we seek justfiication for trust. We have a zero-trust principle. We also have the rule of leaste privilige which means not to extend trust/permissions where it’s not necessary for the mission. Why would I trust a PDF when I can take steps to access the PDF in a way that does not need excessive trust?

The masses (security naive folks) operate in the reverse-- they trust by default and look for reasons to distrust. That’s not wise.

In Canada, and elsewhere, insurance companies know everything about you before you even apply, and it’s likely true elsewhere too.

When you move, how do they find out if you don’t tell them? Tracking would be one way.

Privacy is about control. When you call it paranoia, the concept of agency has escaped you. If you have privacy, you can choose what you disclose. What would be good rationale for giving up control?

Even if they don’t have personally identifiable information, you’ll be in a data bucket with your neighbours, with risk profiles based on neighbourhood, items being insuring, claim rates for people with similar profiles, etc. Very likely every interaction you have with them has been going into a LLM even prior to the advent of ChatGPT, and they will have scored those interactions against a model.

If we assume that’s true, what do you gain by giving them more solid data to reinforce surreptitious snooping? You can’t control everything but It’s not in your interest to sacrifice control for nothing.

But what you will end up doing instead is triggering fraudulent behaviour flags. There’s something called “address fraud”, where people go out of their way to disguise their location, because some lower risk address has better rates or whatever.

Indeed for some types of insurance policies the insurer has a legitimate need to know where you reside. But that’s the insurer’s problem. This does not rationalize a consumer who recklessly feeds surreptitious surveillance. Street wise consumers protect themselves of surveillance. Of course they can (and should) disclose their new address if they move via proper channels.

Why? Because someone might take a vacation somewhere and interact from another state. How long is a vacation? It’s for the consumer to declare where they intend to live, e.g. via “declaration of domicile”. Insurance companies will harrass people if their intel has an inconsistency. Where is that trust you were talking about? There is no reciprocity here.

When you do everything you can to scrub your location, this itself is a signal that you are operating as a highly paranoid individual and that might put you in a bucket.

Sure, you could end up in that bucket if you are in a strong minority of street wise consumers. If the insurer wants to waste their time chasing false positives, the time waste is on them. I would rather laugh at that than join the street unwise club that makes the street wise consumers stand out more.

Don’t Canadian insurance companies want to know where their customers are? Or are the Canadian privacy safeguards good on this?

In the US, Europe (despite the GDPR), and other places, banks and insurance companies snoop on their customers to track their whereabouts as a normal common way of doing business. They insert surreptitious tracker pixels in email to not only track the fact that you read their msg but also when you read the msg and your IP (which gives whereabouts). If they suspect you are not where they expect you to be, they take action. They modify your policy. It’s perfectly legal in the US to use sneaky underhanded tracking techniques rather than the transparent mechanism described in RFC 2298. If your suppliers are using RFC 2298 and not involuntary tracking mechanisms, lucky you.

You’re kind of freaking out about nothing.

I highly recommend Youtube video l6eaiBIQH8k, if you can track it down. You seem to have no general idea about PDF security problems.

And I’m not sure why an application would output a pdf this way. But there’s nothing harmful going on.

If you can’t explain it, then you don’t understand it. Thus you don’t have answers.

It’s a bad practice to just open a PDF you did not produce without safeguards. Shame on me for doing it… I got sloppy but it won’t happen again.

Also worth noting Brother uses that trick where empty cartridges are detected by a laser which is exactly not positioned as low on the cartridge as it could be, forcing people to toss not-so-empty cartridges.

BTW, regarding the trackers dots I’ll drop a link here for anyone who wants to verify Brother’s role in it:

https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots

Another reason to use inkjets: GHG footprint. Inkjets use far less energy than lasers. It’s a shame we have to choose between ecocide and tricks and traps.

The only no-compromise path I see is to pull an inkjet from the dumpster, fix it, and refill the cartridges with homemade “ink” from spent coffee grounds and tea.

My request to a Carnegie Mellon (#CMU) researcher was ignored. The ACM website published someone’s work which was said to include source code. Then the code was omitted from the attached ZIP file, which only contained another copy of the article. I asked the lead researcher (a prof) for the code and was ignored. Also asked the other researchers (apparently students), who also ignored the request. The code would have made it possible to reproduce the research and verify it.

ACM also ignored my request and also neglected to fix the misinfo (the claim that source code is available).

It seems like this should taint the research in some way. Why don’t they want people reproducing the research? I mean, if the idea is that scientific research is “peer reviewed” for integrity, it seems like a façade. Or is there some kind of 3rd party who would call this out?

@theRealBassist@lemmy.world

That’s interesting. It sounds like browsers could be designed smarter. I get “403 Forbidden” chronically in the normal course of web browsing. In principle if a server is going to refuse to serve me, then I want to give the server as little as possible. Shouldn’t Tor browser attempt to reach the landing page of the host first just to check the headers for a 403, then if no 403 proceed to the full URL?

#dataMinimization

I suppose you could even say text-based clients are at a disadvantage because when we opt to render the HTML graphically, a full-blown browser is launched which is likely less hardened than something like whatever profile and engine Thunderbird embeds.

In my case I created a firejailed browser with --net=none so I could hit a certain key binding to launch the neutered browser to render an HTML attachment in a forced-offline context— but I was too fucking lazy to dig up what keys I bound to that which is why I (almost?) got burnt.

Indeed, but what what was logged? Suppose the tracker pixel is something like:

https://www.website.com/uniqueDirForTracking/b1946ac92492d2347c6235b4d2611184.gif

and I visit that URL from Tor. The server at www.website.com can easily log the (useless) Tor IP and timestamp, but does it log the b1946ac92492d2347c6235b4d2611184? I’m not an expert on this which is why I am asking, but with my rough understanding I suspect that transaction might break down to multiple steps:

1. a TLS negotiation just with the www.website.com host
2. if successful, a session cookie may or may not be sent.
3. the “document” (“image”) is fetched by an HTTPGET req (using the cookie, if given).

If the negotiation is blocked by the firewall, does the server ever even see the request for b1946ac92492d2347c6235b4d2611184.gif?

Ah, interesting point. I didn’t realise the devs were Russian. That might explain this issue as well:

https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/15927

OSMand is so glitchy and crash prone it would be useful to know which features are more inclined to hog resources, since resource insufficiency seems to be the reason for crashes. Things like the animation boolean and Kalman filter. I’m not sure if I should avoid those features.

For one person it crashes on long routes. For me a long route is more likely to have crashes just because the app must run for longer. My workaround is to save every route as a track before starting, so every time it crashes I don’t have to wait to recalculate the route (but I have to keep my eyes on the screen).

thanks!

I DM’d you. Thanks for responding!

It’s also a human rights issue. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art.17:

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.