PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)(gwern.net) |
PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)(gwern.net) |
PDFs are meant to be a presentation document format, not an editable document format. I have some experience editing PDFs, and it's difficult to make significant modifications. Editing small sections of text or replacing a date is fine, but once you try to start editing entire paragraphs or changing the layout, it quickly becomes unmanageable. The kerning looks weird, the spacing between words looks off, and when you look into it you realize the the sentence you're trying to edit is actually split across a dozen text objects. For these it becomes almost impossible to edit without destroying the spacing, so you just give up.
And the approved way to edit these PDFs is via Adobe Acrobat Pro, which costs $20/month (ugh), which I'm not willing to pay for.
So I think this is why we just don't see that many PDF forgeries. The editing tools just aren't very good. Maybe it's different now we can just ask Claude to edit our PDFs for us.
Even generating them on the fly can be a real pain. I had a workflow when I was out of work to auto-generate a CV based upon re-writing sections to match the spec. So I'd have pre-written blocks and slot them in. And yet, somehow, even then it would break formatting all over the place.
Inkscape is a pretty good tool to edit .pdfs
when you import a regular .pdf, it needs to convert it once, and once saved, you can edit the pdf and work on it as if it was a regular .svg
if you choose to embed the fonts when saving, .pdf files becomes easy to work on, you don't even need to export them.
[1] https://www.fincen.gov/mortgage-loan-fraud
[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/licensed-mortgage-loan-...
and all those things listed wouldn’t be prosecuted, as long as you don’t touch mortgages
I would say KYC in general is a joke and nobody cares, as long as FinCEN and the DOJ believe KYC is working. But as far as the peddling of forged PDF’s go, very common, just not at the point of where the more damaging crime occurs ….. except in mortgage fraud, where that crime explicitly considers the fake employment letter to be the crime
If you want to forge a PDF, you do it because you have a private target in mind. Financial fraud, corporate espionage... There are other settings but people don't just share PDFs around for you to see a deluge of fake ones.
1. General public don't read papers.
2. General public have lowered trust to them.
3. It's not impossible to produce and publish genuine paper with forged data.
Some software rewrap the page into say additional XObject, some add unique elements, some change one IDs but not the others.
I had a great blog post about it but can't find it right now. Will post if find the link.
Not like altering lines or anything material (I can already imagine the breathless replies being typed about how it's "antisocial" if someone's deck doesn't meet setbacks by 1ft or something) but changing text to remove references that would indicate other survey work was done that they don't wanna submit to public record, changing a labeled distance by a couple feet to make something that already exists technically compliant.
Like with everything else it's the little guys sticking their necks out. The big guys can afford good surveyors who "get it" and don't need to be told when a difference within the bounds of measurement error and will have four or five figure implications or that a survey result is so unfavorable that they should just call the client, bill whatever they would have charged as a consulting fee and not screw their client with the liability of a paper trail.
If someone were to share a preprint PDF that I don't believe, my instinct would be to double-check it against the institution associated with its publication. If it was never published then it's basically just a screenshot of a blog post.
Ohhh okay the opening makes more sense now. The blog above is publishing papers in form of blog posts as a protest against scientific publishing. I love the energy, but ruminating on how weird it is that so few people take advantage of the thing that you're weird for doing in the first place feels... obtuse?
Seen as (unsigned) PDFs are basically images of documents, it's wild to claim that there are no forgeries, anyone doing a good ole fake document, fake diploma, fake wire transfer, fake articles of incorporation, etc... is using a pdf for faking. A nigerian prince scam sending an attachment mentioning 15.000.000$ locked up in inheritance would constitute a PDF forgery.
> There is plenty of incompetence, fraud, and malice online, often in PDFs… but only new PDFs. I can’t think of a single fraud accomplished by editing a real PDF & just uploading it for Google Scholar etc. or where I’ve been burned by even mislabeling.
> (In the rare cases anyone tampers with PDFs, it quickly turns into a technical morass and he-said-she-said, and requires several orders of magnitude more effort to prove than to do; consider the hoops epxperts had to jump through in the Craig Wright cases, or even just a landlord editing a contract—where the contract was done through a digital document timestamping service!)
Specifically "epxperts"
The Dieselgate is a good analogy. Incentives, how easy it is to get to profit.
No rain drop thinks it is responsible for the flood, but I am hard-pressed to imagine a blog article greatly swayed hearts and minds.
This one?
It seems to be listing the pros and cons of nicotine and is well-sourced...
What "damage" do you see caused by this article?
I understand why personal vaporizer use was demonized, but -goddamn- that's going to be a public health disaster only an order of magnitude or two smaller than when folks started demonizing nuclear power back in the mid 1900's.
Can you be more specific about exactly which "entire generation" uniformly and mindlessly takes their suicidal marching orders from Gwern?
And how is it that he only damaged the entirity of ONE generation, sparing all the others?
From the overconfident emphatic incoherency of your accusation, it sounds more like you're addicted to cocaine than niccotine.
> "Whereas, if you were so epistemically careless with images on, say, Facebook, you would wind up with a folder stuffed full of lying images which have been Photoshopped, claimed to be things other than what they are, ‘deep faked’, etc"
Maybe because a paper is a comprehending medium, expecting the reader to understand its source and interpret the content on a more intellectual level, whereas effective images/videos are usually framed to be understood immediately.
i.e. if I want to convince people that lizard-people live among us and I want to manufacture proof, my demographic probably responds more to images with a lizard than a reinterpreted academic paper...
Can this actually be done without an ISBN or DOI number?
Most people just never understand how powerful can be TeX and fear this path, because it takes a long training and the investment in time is huge. But you don't need to master all the details to do simple text replacements or filling a form with your name and address. That part can be learned in a day, and is totally free.
Students giving out free Microsoft licenses they could access through their University to people they knew was a thing, because Microsoft activation hacks had all kinds of problems.
s/probably/massively. You don't see ads and public health messages for quitting coffee, you don't see bans for coffee advertising, but you do see a whole lot of things aimed at reducing or quitting nicotine products.
Besides, nicotine withdrawal is utter hell. Caffeine withdrawal usually is solved by a night of good healthy sleep - most people drink coffee (or energy drinks) only because they are forced by circumstances to work against their chronotype.
You would if coffee has the same probability of causing cancer as smoking.
Being addictive on its own is rarely a reason to demonise a substance. The addictive substances that are demonised are always those that also have negative health effects, even in moderation (like smoking).
That'd be because -unlike cigarette and cigar smoking- coffee doesn't create a substantially elevated risk of cancer.
Had we had the tech for portable personal nicotine vaporizers back in the 1600s [0] and retained it until today, I very strongly expect that -other than the "Drugs of all kinds are bad!" moralizers- you'd not see much of that sort of concern.
> Besides, nicotine withdrawal is utter hell.
Waaaay back when when I quit cold turkey after smoking for a couple of years I was very grouchy and irritable (and knew that a cigarette would fix it) for like a week. That was it. I've not tried nicotine vaporizers, but I'd be interested to see if -given similarly sized nicotine doses- quitting vaporized nicotine after a couple of years is as annoying as quitting cigarettes was.
> Caffeine withdrawal usually is solved by a night of good healthy sleep...
That tells me that you haven't gone through serious caffeine withdrawal. The effects from quitting caffeine cold turkey last for less time, but way more unpleasant than quitting cigarettes.
[0] ...or whenever it was that tobacco smoking started to become A Thing...
Caffeine is way worse for me, the days that I consume zero caffeine I pretty much always end up with a migrate and minor. If I don't use my vaporizer, I get mildly irritated by not having it around but no prominent physiological effects
Minor what?
And yeah, two things:
1) It's telling that -despite the fact that the closest store that I get my coffee and tea from also sells cigarettes (and that I'm so obviously old that they don't ask me for ID, so that minor inconvenience isn't a factor)- I've been able to quit nicotine, but never able to quit caffeine.
2) I can't even count the number of times I've consumed a mug of tea or coffee for no other reason than to avoid withdrawal symptoms. Cigarettes were never like that for me. Just like caffeine, I inevitably developed a tolerance... but working through nicotine withdrawal was annoying, rather than _painful_.
There are lots of yummy drinks that contain caffeine which is a shame for those quitting but a boon for myself, I personally like the taste of redbull much to my dentists dismay