Gwern is talk about editing an existing pdf. Less so about creating one from scratch.

There is plenty of incompetence, fraud, and malice online, often in PDFs… but only new PDFs. I can’t think of a single fraud accomplished by editing a real PDF & just uploading it for Google Scholar etc. or where I’ve been burned by even mislabeling.

was linked in the article!

I believe it's actually linked in the OP about half way down. What a crazy thing for an agent to do - to turn a minor disagreement into a maybe-crime.

Are you saying that RightSignature puts the checksum information inside the document and therefore destroys the checksum? What is the thinking behind that?

Typos are so easy to weed out these days, I assume including them is a stylistic choice.

Are you talking about vapes?

I have no sense of gwen's readership numbers, but I find it unlikely that one rather erudite blog has anything to do with global nicotine consumption. People have been smoking for centuries. The vaping industry had guerilla marketing campaigns to target college kids.

No rain drop thinks it is responsible for the flood, but I am hard-pressed to imagine a blog article greatly swayed hearts and minds.

You don't see ads and public health messages for quitting coffee, you don't see bans for coffee advertising,

You would if coffee has the same probability of causing cancer as smoking.

Being addictive on its own is rarely a reason to demonise a substance. The addictive substances that are demonised are always those that also have negative health effects, even in moderation (like smoking).

You don't see ads and public health messages for quitting coffee, you don't see bans for coffee advertising...

That'd be because -unlike cigarette and cigar smoking- coffee doesn't create a substantially elevated risk of cancer.

Had we had the tech for portable personal nicotine vaporizers back in the 1600s [0] and retained it until today, I very strongly expect that -other than the "Drugs of all kinds are bad!" moralizers- you'd not see much of that sort of concern.

Besides, nicotine withdrawal is utter hell.

Waaaay back when when I quit cold turkey after smoking for a couple of years I was very grouchy and irritable (and knew that a cigarette would fix it) for like a week. That was it. I've not tried nicotine vaporizers, but I'd be interested to see if -given similarly sized nicotine doses- quitting vaporized nicotine after a couple of years is as annoying as quitting cigarettes was.

Caffeine withdrawal usually is solved by a night of good healthy sleep...

That tells me that you haven't gone through serious caffeine withdrawal. The effects from quitting caffeine cold turkey last for less time, but way more unpleasant than quitting cigarettes.

[0] ...or whenever it was that tobacco smoking started to become A Thing...

Really? I don’t see anything objectionable in the article - and ‘an entire generation??’ How do you figure?

Good to see you change it from "PDFs are Presentation Document Format" => "PDFs are meant to be a presentation document format". Next time, don't forget edit log..

The flip side to this is that when you do come across a forged PDF (and I have!), they can be really, really effective. Nobody expects them. There are usually tells in the metadata, but... there don't have to be.

I saw it alot in the fake KYC world, phantom commodities trades

and all those things listed wouldn’t be prosecuted, as long as you don’t touch mortgages

I would say KYC in general is a joke and nobody cares, as long as FinCEN and the DOJ believe KYC is working. But as far as the peddling of forged PDF’s go, very common, just not at the point of where the more damaging crime occurs ….. except in mortgage fraud, where that crime explicitly considers the fake employment letter to be the crime

Yes. Libgen/Sci-Hub have minimal metadata requirements. And they especially do not require ISBNs/DOIs because there are an incredible number of documents out there with neither one. It would be absurd to ban all pre-1970 books, and lots of journals to this day don't bother issuing DOIs.

Ok this one actually baffles me -- anyone have the energy to explain what I'm missing? The repeated concern about forged scientific papers doesn't really track, but that's what academic institutions are for, at least in part.

If someone were to share a preprint PDF that I don't believe, my instinct would be to double-check it against the institution associated with its publication. If it was never published then it's basically just a screenshot of a blog post.

Ohhh okay the opening makes more sense now. The blog above is publishing papers in form of blog posts as a protest against scientific publishing. I love the energy, but ruminating on how weird it is that so few people take advantage of the thing that you're weird for doing in the first place feels... obtuse?

"And when you do find a PDF claiming something malicious, [..] it’s always a ‘new’ PDF, which is forthright about it being a new unpublished ‘white paper’ or somesuch, and doesn’t purport to be a published paper."

"Whereas, if you were so epistemically careless with images on, say, Facebook, you would wind up with a folder stuffed full of lying images which have been Photoshopped, claimed to be things other than what they are, ‘deep faked’, etc"

Maybe because a paper is a comprehending medium, expecting the reader to understand its source and interpret the content on a more intellectual level, whereas effective images/videos are usually framed to be understood immediately.

i.e. if I want to convince people that lizard-people live among us and I want to manufacture proof, my demographic probably responds more to images with a lizard than a reinterpreted academic paper...

Forged and modified PDFs were definitely a problem in some commercial areas that I used to work in (this was about 15 years ago).