On Jan 31, 2015, at 8:59 AM, John Young <jya@pipeline.com> wrote:
Swell initiatives by all the Snowden distributors. Except most fall prey to PDF manipulation of tagging, implanting, tracking, by willful intent or by technical ignorance.
It is virtually impossible to sanitize PDFs due to Adobe's inherent design to meticulously spy on use of its products as well as deluded user attempts to hide who, when, what, how by users from creation to modification to wiping to stego to signing to forging to stinging. Image or accessible-text or other PDF formats, locked, redacted, watermarked, et al.
Pardon my ignorance about this, and I will do my own research, but do these hidden formattings/stego/call-home functions disappear, get mutilated, become broken when ‘converting’ such PDF documents to other document types via use of many ‘conversion’ tools (Calibre comes to mind instantly) or are these embedded organisms a persistent across any automated conversion routine? Cheers, Benjamin