magick -density 150 input.pdf \ -colorspace Gray \ -virtual-pixel White -background White \ -rotate 0.7 +repage \ -attenuate 0.45 +noise Gaussian \ -blur 0x0.4 \ -brightness-contrast -5x12 \ -compress jpeg -quality 78 scanned.pdf
The only tell tale sign is that the text still has this aliasing like texture that doesn’t happen in real scanned pages.
From my bookmarks (found on HN originally!)
https://gist.github.com/andyrbell/25c8632e15d17c83a54602f6ac...
So I moved my money out of the account. That worked fine.
The description however seems like the creator just likes how scanned documents look. They describe it like how analogue music fans describe vinyl records. I guess everything is nostalgic to someone out there eventually.
I don’t know whether this tool enables that, but the idea is in the neighbourhood of “make it look scanned”.
Poland is also strong on that, requiring "readable handwritten signatures".
This will end when the dinosaurs that still feel it is important go away.
I am not asserting the authors intent is to facilitate fraud or there isn’t any other practical use, but let’s not be naive and act like fraud isn’t a likely use.
Before you downvote at least respond with why you think my analysis is wrong.
My bank demands that I perform this ridiculous hoop-jumping. Like others here, I use ImageMagick hocus pocus to defeat them with trivial ease (a couple of times they complained so I tweaked the algo a bit and they were happy). The whole situation is beyond absurd. It's security theater in place of security.
Just because you don’t like the security theatre does make it acceptable to misrepresent the origin of a document to satisfy the security requirements.
And I gave a specific example, slipping a page into a document that wasn’t in the original and making it look like it belongs by making it look scanned.
Imagine I changed the purchase price on your home to 10% of its value rather than the original agreed price and took it to court to enforce the purchase. This tech would make that appear more credible.
As a preamble, I have zero moral qualms about technically committing fraud in order to access my own money (almost nobody would).
More important, I choose not to respect a law that upholds an insecure and broken system. A parallel with traffic regulations come to mind: as a cyclist I regularly break rules when I consider that they do not best serve my safety. All things being equal, I follow the law. But all things are not always equal and bad laws are there for the breaking.
The correct outcome here is that the law is tested and amended. That is the way to end the perverse situation of the precise example you raise, where anybody with technical skills can fake a document and then win in court.
I said that process would be used in other fraudulent acts.
The real problem is that written signatures are a poor form of authentication.
That is an example of a flawed argument named false equivalence. And it ignores that the this library eliminates the friction of printing, and enables the ability to scale the process.
There might be extra stuff that can be done to remedy that with this tool, but I'm not sure I'd ever use this anyway.
There are too many PDF tools that are unnecessarily paywalled, or have a paid tier that don't make any sense.
We need more tools from paid ones that should be completely free and OSS.
