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Top-level
jonny

You can see for yourself using exiftool.
To remove all of the top-level metadata, you can use exiftool and qpdf:

exiftool -all:all= <path.pdf> -o <output1.pdf>
qpdf --linearize <output1.pdf> <output2.pdf>

To remove *all* metadata, you can use dangerzone or mat2

24 comments
jonny

Also present in the metadata are NISO tags for document status indicating the "final published version" (VoR), and limits on what domains it should be present on. Elsevier scans for PDFs with this metadata, so good idea to strip it any time you're sharing a copy.

jonny

Links:
exiftool: exiftool.org/
qpdf: qpdf.sourceforge.io/
dangerzone (GUI, render PDF as images, then re-OCR everything): dangerzone.rocks/
mat2 (render PDF as images, don't OCR): 0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2

jonny

here's a shell script that recursively removes metadata from pdfs in a provided (or current) directory as described above. For mac/*nix-like computers, and you need to have qpdf and exiftool installed:
gist.github.com/sneakers-the-r

jonny

The metadata appears to be preserved on papers from sci-hub. since it works by using harvested academic credentials to download papers, this would allow publishers to identify which accounts need to be closed/secured
twitter.com/json_dirs/status/1

jonny

for any security researchers out there, here are a few more "hashes" that a few have noted do not appear to be random and might be decodable. exiftool apparently squashed the whitespace so there is a bit more structure to them than in the OP:
gist.github.com/sneakers-the-r

jonny

this is the way to get the correct tags:
(on mac i needed to install gnu grep with homebrew `brew install grep` and then use `ggrep` )
will follow up with dataset tomorrow.
twitter.com/horsemankukka/stat

jonny

of course there's smarter watermarking, the metadata is notable because you could scan billions of pdfs fast. this comment on HN got me thinking about this PDF /OpenAction I couldn't make sense of earlier, on open, access metadata, so something with sizes and layout...

jonny replied to jonny

updated the above gist with correctly extracted tags, and included python code to extract your own, feel free to add them in the comments. since we don't know what they contain yet not adding other metadata. definitely patterned, not a hash, but idk yet.
twitter.com/json_dirs/status/1

jonny replied to jonny

you go to school to study "the brain" and then the next thing you know you're learning how to debug surveillance in PDF rendering to understand how publishers have so contorted the practice of science for profit. how can there be "normal science" when this is normal?

jonny replied to jonny

follow-up: there does not appear to be any further watermarking: taking two files with different identifying tags, stripping metadata, and relinearizing with qpdf's --deterministic-id flag yields PDFs identical with a diff, ie. no differentiating watermark (but plz check my work)

jonny replied to jonny

which is surprising to me, so I'm a little hesitant to make that as a general claim

Nick Astley replied to jonny

@jonny

It's a couple things:

a) Elsevier's vendor's tool only has to be good enough to impress Elsevier

b) Deterrence being more efficient than prevention

shusha replied to jonny

@jonny for the normativity of science see the discourse of STS (science and technology studien), great field!

jonny replied to shusha

@shusha
yes definitely, love it and spend basically all my time reading it nowadays ❤️

robryk

@jonny I wonder whether uploading every paper to sci-hub twice would be feasible (i.e. would we still have enough people do that). (If we did so, then it would allow sci-hub to verify with reasonable certainty that whatever watermark-removal method they would use still works.)

jonny

@robryk
I think it may be easier to scrub it server side, like to have admins clean the PDFs they have. I don't know of any crowdsourced sci-hub-like projects. scrubbing metadata does seem to render the PDFs identical

robryk

@jonny And then obviously the watermarking techniques will adapt. Asking for two copies is a way to ensure that whatever we are doing still manages to scrub the watermark (they should be identical after scrubbing).

jonny

@robryk
yes, definitely. all of the above. fix what you have now, adapt to changes, making double grabs part of the protocol makes sense :)

Advanced Persistent Teapot

@jonny hmmm, alternatively start inserting copies of that metadata into blank or template PDFs. Send 'em chasing wild geese and make them look at Lorem Ipsum 50 times a day 😈

Thai Thien

@http_error_418 @jonny Very well.
Do you have code to insert those code ? I would like to help.
Btw, you can use mathgen thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/ to make meaningless paper to upload on scribd

:garfield:‍fuchsiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

@jonny word of caution is that while removing exif is good, knowing publishers there's a bunch of other ways they'd directly include such trackers into the file, in a less human/machine readable spot than EXIF. so be careful

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