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Comparing protected PDF files using Adobe Acrobat

Reviewing long PDF documents, especially ones with a lot of legalese, is cumbersome and tedious work. It takes a lot of time to just read and understand everything, especially when the document is not written in your native language. So, you read, and you finish the review, and you have a set of changes you need to do. The other party makes the changes, and then you need to confirm that everything is as you requested. And what if the old and the new version of your PDF document is protected? The Problem I found myself in a pickle once with protected PDFs. I needed to quickly review and compare two versions of PDF documents, ~100 pages long, with my changes added; turned out that the other side has also added ~150 changes to the document that are less relevant, such as spelling and grammar. And both previous and the new version were protected, thus disabling my ability to simply feed both documents to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and compare. Due to the protections, I was unable to edit, or eve...

Sad state of email encryption in Serbia - or how a web based bank just does not encrypt emails

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Not long ago, browsing through my received emails in my gmail, I've realized that one of the banks I use does not use TLS when sending emails to their clients. Of course, being a security aware customer of the bank, and having in mind that I am their client, I've decided to contact them with this information, pointing out the fact that Gmail, a 21st century go-to free email provider, makes this very prominent in each mail they send. The usual ways of contacting the bank in question is either via phone, email or Twitter. Since they don't encrypt their email traffic, and I didn't have time for waiting on their staff on the phone (who does these days, right?), I've decided to use Twitter. I had previous experience with them via this channel, and a positive one. They seemed to be on top of any problems they receive via tweets, and are quite fast to reply. Translation: "Hello @TelenorBanka, did you know that emails you're sending to your clients are not en...

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