The key here is that this is a reasonable legal hurdle. It would be like the terms of service you never read when installing a piece of software.

Thanks. I moved it to the right spot. Congrats on finding out where it actually belonged from the few clues!

It will at least stop AI training from claiming fair use.

And demand an additional disclaimer that “use of the contents of this book for AI training purposes is explicitely forbidden”.

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If Fakebook or ex-Twatter suddely have to remove all hate-, shit-, and Nazi posts, they would probably be rather … empty?

More than three syllables, too complicated for the average American.

But also: databases shouldn’t forbid uncommon unicode letters if it isn’t called for.

I stumble across this issue quite often. When you fill out a form for US customs, you are both required to provide exact data and you are only allowed a-z, 0-9, and some punctuation. That you cannot fulfil both because they are mutually exclusive does not cross their blessed little minds.

Fiberglass, carbon fibers, or small steel wires. They don’t need to be long, the snippets are only a few centimeters in the video I have seen.

In fairness, rural America probably didn’t entirely understand the implications of said vote.

That’s not the point. They voted for this, so they are responsible for this.

“Minecraft Killer”. For that, it should have been released first, shouldn’t it?

And even if it was a super mega game, it might just find a niche on its own.

Getting a discount to hand over your data into their cloud so they can train their AIs on it? And hold you hostage in case you dare to switch the OS?

And all that inadequate training, guidance and oversight was due to priorising profits over safety.

Time to head for greener pastures.

The compressing and renumbering seems to be more common with embedded Chinese fonts - Space-wise it makes a lot of sense. But yes, mark and copy text, paste it into word or writer, and you get gibberish. Can’t verify the search, though. And, of course, Google translate can’t do anything with it, either.

If you ever need to edit a PDF that way, just use Inkscape. It is way better than LO draw for that.

It is not a curse. It does exactly what it is intended to do: Create an archive of a document that is universally reproduceable.

It is a very well designed cul-de-sac for exactly this purpose. Using it for anything else is calling for trouble.

The problem lies in the PDFs themselves. In there are objects that represent lines of glyphs. If you are lucky. A conversion tool can guess which of those lines belong together and produce the text.

It cannot know any intentions behind it, though. Take a numbered list. The first line is two line objects: the number plus the . or the ), and the first line of text. The conversion tool can now guess. As the line blocks with the numbers are all left of the line blocks with text, this could be a numbered list. Or it could be a table with two columns. Nothing in the PDF is giving any hints.

And that is the easy part. This assumes that the document either uses default fonts, or keeps its embedded fonts untouched. If they use embedded fonts and a PDF optimizer that only embeds the used characters and renumbers them, any copy or conversion tool is bound to fail.

Same with protected PDFs where you simply cannot copy the text from the start.

And then there are PDFs that just consist of scanned pages. Here you would need an OCR software to get something readable out of them.

PDF is an archival, output format, the end of a process. Not something to work from.

Always preserve the original file. Keep it safe. If you change tools, make sure you have a conversion path into something editable. The PDF is for giving away, nothing else.

It only needs one right drone with the right payload at the right place and time…

Yes, indeed. Can you buy or build a drone in the US? No problem. Can you get explosives or other nasty stuff to arm it? No issue for a determined group. Can you find an undefended soft target? Of course, there is a smorgasboard of those.