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1. jonny (jonny@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jan-2022 16:44:59 UTC jonny

   More fun publisher surveillance:
   Elsevier embeds a hash in the PDF metadata that is *unique for each time a PDF is downloaded*, this is a diff between metadata from two of the same paper. Combined with access timestamps, they can uniquely identify the source of any shared PDFs.

   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 likes this.
   • Seachaint :verified: (seachaint@hackers.town)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jan-2022 16:45:02 UTC Seachaint :verified:

     in reply to

     • Beckett

     @beckett @jonny "PDFparanoia" was a project for exactly this - to strip identifying watermarks and metadata from shared academic PDFs. But it fell victim to the Python 2 to 3 transition and the mess of the PDF libraries in particular, and then fell to bitrot. Would be nice to see it brought back to health.

     Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 likes this.
   • Beckett (beckett@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jan-2022 16:45:07 UTC Beckett

     in reply to

     @jonny I do not have any IT skills, but if I did I’d love to write a script to remove metadata from PDFs. Adobe has them wrapped up pretty well.