Redacting a PDF robustly
Avanti comrades! How Apple’s ‘hobby’ went from zero to hero and revolutionised TV along the way
QHow can I remove private material from a PDF document, so others can’t see it? Could I use Preview?
AThis is redaction, and it’s fraught with dangers which have led to the revelation of many secrets.
The rather naive approach of superimposing black boxes doesn’t work because others can easily remove them to reveal underlying text. The PDF format is far from ideal in this respect, as it’s relatively simple to extract text from sections of a document which you think have been removed, as they’re retained in the file.
Preview now offers a simple redaction feature, but when tested it can easily leave hidden text behind, which you can’t see but can be recovered. Third-party PDF utilities offer improved reliability, but if it’s essential that a document is robustly redacted, the only app to trust is Adobe Acrobat DC. Unfortunately, though Acrobat DC is expensive and really quite hard to use.
Many simply print the document, redact it using marker pens, and scan it back in. Although time-consuming and tedious, this is the only way to guarantee that others can’t recover sensitive content.
Apple is a computer company; Apple is a gadget company; Apple is a lifestyle company – and Apple is now solidly a TV company, too. Apple TV+ is quickly growing from an also-ran to a serious contender in the streaming game, and Apple’s own studios are producing world-leading content. The days of the Videos app and iTunes rentals seem long behind us. This is the way things are done, and Apple is doing it well.
Confusing nomenclature aside – you do not need an Apple TV to watch Apple TV+, or indeed to use the Apple TV app, which is a way to connect to various TV services through Apple but on non-Apple TV devices – Cupertino’s own TV streamer is one of the absolute best on the market today, with the ability and the operating system to cover the next few years, too.
But it wasn’t always that way. The story of Apple TV sees the company getting things spectacularly wrong on the way to getting them right, treating the Apple TV like an afterthought before making it core to its business, and generally sitting a little way behind others in the streaming world before making its play for the top. Whether you see this as a typically Apple trait is on you (and if you’ve watched the early growth of some of its other products, you just might), but there’s no doubt that Apple TV is now one of the very best streamers on the market, with value far beyond just putting movies on your TV.