[plug] MS Curriculum at schools and TAFEs ...

[Christian]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 07:31:50PM +0800, Andrew Francis wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Bill Kenworthy wrote:
> > A perenial problem!  Just count your blessings they dont export them
> > from word and process them into copy protected, password protected, no
> > cut&paste and no print pdf's as one Murdoch lecturer did!  Until them I
> > did not realize that such pdf's existed!
> 
> I think the password protection would be a problem (it uses the password
> as a key to encrypt the contents of the PDF file), but all of the "copy
> protection" stuff consists only of flags in the file which tells the
> reader software what it should and shouldn't let the user do. Adobe
> Acrobat, naturally, complies with the directives in the file, and so does
> Xpdf. GNU Ghostscript, however, doesn't.

What exactly does the password protect?  Access to the file or simply
printing or cut/pasting it?  I'm also not certain that it actually
"encrypts" anything -- certainly not strongly.  Adobe never seems to
have had any trouble exporting their Acrobat viewer software.  I know
there is a version of xpdf that Debian's non-us (xpdf-i) but I can't see
how the crypto could possible offer any protection.  Worse case scenario
is you download the xpdf source and change it to allow you to do
anything you want. 

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DSA 0x0EC1D28C: BBCB 0D79 4EBB 078A A066  7267 8BED E9D6 0EC1 D28C