In a multiple-item format modified from our Light Friday series, we offer two interesting excerpts from up-to-the-minute articles, along with several questions for IMT readers.

The Serious Side of “CIA Mistakenly Ruins Decades-Worth of Documents”

Yes, the original snippet mentioned here on the IMT Blog was from satire-extraordinaire publication, The Onion. There’s a serious side to covering sensitive information in electronic documents, however. According to this article on ZDNet, it’s better to delete any information you don’t want to share, instead of highlighting over it in black. I’m a little surprised that we need the National Security Agency to inform us of this revelation, but it seems the obvious isn’t quite so obvious to some. Three common mistakes, according to the ZDNet article, include:

• Covering text, charts, tables or diagrams with black rectangles, or highlighting text in black…is not effective, in general, for computer documents distributed across computer networks (i.e. in “softcopy” format). The most common mistake is covering text with black.

• In addition to the visible content of a document, most office tools, such as (Microsoft) Word, contain substantial hidden information about the document. This information is often as sensitive as the original document, and its presence in downgraded or sanitized documents has historically led to compromise.

The article continues, “Both the Word and Adobe PDF formats can contain many kinds of information–such as text, graphics, tables, images and metadata–all mixed together. ‘The complexity makes them potential vehicles for exposing information unintentionally, especially when downgrading or sanitizing classified materials,’ the NSA said.”

The NSA now offers a 13-page paper (PDF) called “Redacting with confidence: How to safely publish sanitized reports converted from Word to PDF.”

I would think such sanitization would also apply to increasingly shared engineering documents in both Word and PDF formats.

What do you think?

The Plot Thickens…

…with Adobe’s announcement (finally) of Acrobat 3D — which supports the conversion of 3D engineering models from various CAD formats — and embed those 3D elements into PDFs. While perhaps not a traditional CAD viewing package, Acrobat 3D could be blazing a more universal CAD viewing trail. Of course, recipients needn’t have the originating applications to view the 3D models.

Wait. It gets better.

According to this article on Yahoo from Newsfactor.com…

“The software’s capabilities go even further than simple 3D, Bhalla explained. It provides interactive capabilities so users can edit lighting, add textures and materials, and create animations that include assembly and disassembly instructions for 3D models. Those viewing the images can rotate them, zoom in or out, create cross-section views, and add comments regarding specific parts of an engine model, for example. Technical publishers and creative professionals can use Acrobat 3D to insert 3D models into Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.”

Do you think companies will jump on this new package? Have document security concerns also ramped up?