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87 lines
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
87 lines
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 4016
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Title: HPR4016: Today I learnt
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4016/hpr4016.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:37:56
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,016 from Monday the 25th of December 2023.
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Today's show is entitled, Today I Learned.
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It is hosted by Mr. X and is about seven minutes long.
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It carries an explicit flag.
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The summary is, Today I Learned How to Remove a Password from a File.
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Hello and welcome, Hacker Public Radio Dance.
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My name is Mr. X and welcome to this podcast.
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As usual, I'd like to start by thanking the people HPR for making the service available
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to us all.
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HPR is an invaluable service on these hidden tubes.
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It's a community-led podcast provided by the community for the community.
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That means you could contribute to, why don't you pick up a microphone or your mobile
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phone, tablet, whatever you've got to hand, record a show and send it in.
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We're always looking for shows and I think right now we're about shortening shows.
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For information, it's Sunday the 17th of December.
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I'm currently on holidays, I've wee bit of spare time on my hands and I was just
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asking to show Dave Morris sent in HPR for 002 where he proposed to start a new series
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called, Today I Learned.
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I was thinking, well, actually there was something I just did recently and I thought that's
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a perfect candidate.
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I'm not going to a lot of detail, I'm no expert in the topic I'm going to cover, but hopefully
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somebody will find this interesting.
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I came across a PDF which I wanted to mark up just for reference purposes just so that
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I could look at it and quickly see points of interest within this PDF and I found that
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I was unable to do that because the moment I tried to mark up, it was asking me for
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a password.
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And of course, let's just say I'd forgotten the password.
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I initially thought I could have used this and maybe it didn't look at it in enough
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detail.
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Dave mentioned to me that there's a fantastic application called, I don't know how you
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would say, O-K-U-L-A-R, Ocula and it's great for marking up and splitting PDFs and all
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sorts of stuff like that.
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I'm looking at it briefly, I couldn't see a way to solve the problem with that so I did
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my usual googling.
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And I came across a web page and it gave various suggestions about how you can solve this.
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And the option that worked for me was the command line program, QPDF, now looking at the
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command page for QPDF, when does it say QPDF is a QPDF transformation software.
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The QPDF program is used to convert one PDF file to another equivalent PDF file.
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It is capable of performing a variety of transformations such as linearization, also known as web optimization
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of fast web viewing, encryption and decryption of PDF files.
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It also has many options for inspecting or checking PDF files, some of which are useful
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primarily for PDF developers.
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For a summary of QPDF's options, please run QPDF dash dash help.
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A complete manual can be found in user share.qPDF, QPDF manual.html or as a PDF version as
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well in user share.qPDF, yeah.
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The version was at say version 8028.0.2 April 2008 is the one I'm currently running on my PC
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here.
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So I ran the QPDF with a dash dash help flag and sure enough, dash dash decrypt, remove
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encryption on the file.
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So basically to do that, you just do QPDF space dash dash decrypt space and give the name
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of your input file protected, it says here example protected protected.pdf and then you give
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your new file name you want unprotected.pdf, hit the turn, bam, done.
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Now I noticed down in the comments further down that Evan Gard back in 2016 noted a
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that it won't work if you don't know the user password.
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Owner password is only for enforcing restrictions, user is for opening the file and to be able
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to view it.
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So I guess it depends what security settings the person set when they protect it.
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You could make it such that you could only view it if you know the password at the user
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password.
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So I was able to view this document, I just couldn't mark it up.
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So yeah, so owner password is only for enforcing restrictions.
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So I was able to mark up to my heart's content after issuing that.
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So I thought that was a handy tip if you're ever in that situation.
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Don't know if there's much else I have to say on that, yeah I think that's about it.
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Well, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, depending on when you listen to this, and
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I'm happy new year and others to you and your family.
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And if you've got a spirit minute, when you're off final to send in a show, you can just
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do something and prompt you like this, as I've done, now it said, it doesn't take very
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long and I'm sure we'd all find it interesting.
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Okay, thank you very much, all the best, oh oh finally, I'm so rusty that I forgot and
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need to say, if you want to contact me, you can contact me at MrX at hpr at googlemail.com
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that's MrX MRX AT, hpr the at symbol googlemail.com, hope I've got that right.
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So until next time, hopefully a bit sooner than it's been off late, thank you and goodbye.
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You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
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Today's show was contributed by a hpr listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording podcasts, you click on our contribute link to find out how
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easy it really is. Hosting for hpr has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com,
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the internet archive and rsync.net. On this otherwise status, today's show is released
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under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International License.
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