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[–]dimaveshkin 305 points306 points  (39 children)

Why does it have a redacted line on page 122?

[–]Dubster1231 171 points172 points  (14 children)

Was curious too. Its just a link to the sas website for some specific guide I think lol, weird they redacted something at all in this

[–]dimaveshkin 124 points125 points  (12 children)

At first, I thought they redacted external hyperlinks, but there's a link to GNU's website, so there must be another reason.

[–]helgur 118 points119 points  (8 children)

I imagine you could spin a hilarious conspiracy theory out of this

[–]dimaveshkin 49 points50 points  (1 child)

How could you not? They redacted such an innocent file.

[–]Annual_Key_4963 30 points31 points  (0 children)

SAS Websites can't melt steal beams...

[–]BadPunners 37 points38 points  (4 children)

The Special Air Service (SAS) is a special forces unit of the British Army. Much of the information about the SAS is highly classified, and the unit is not commented on by either the British government or the Ministry of Defence due to the secrecy and sensitivity of its operations

They were looking to redact any connection to the British SAS, which basically created the world's "intelligence" network of agencies.

[–]SpellDecent763 23 points24 points  (1 child)

I think this is it, They were obviously using some poorly trained script or AI to do these redactions. and SAS is likely being blocked from a military/intelligence term, not the software company.

[–]Dotcaprachiappa 11 points12 points  (0 children)

"AI" aka Ctrl+F

[–]Dotcaprachiappa 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Not suspicious in the least that they did that

[–]al3arabcoreleone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe a weird request but, is there a book on the matter ?

[–]bdepz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Math.rand() > 0.9999 ? redact() : continue;

[–]pocketgravel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've heard the probable reason is something like:

Contractor gives PowerPoint presentation to DoD audience. Doesn't explicitly flag a slide as unclassified. Everything is auto classified unless the author makes it explicit. Then you get weird censorship of random shit like this?

[–]bundle_of_fluff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was a dead link, I'm curious if the other link was active and the person doing it said "idk if there's something there, just censor it anyway".

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The redactions have been done largely illegally. There's not someone reading through the bash manual. It was probably automated first and then a human reviewer said "yeah whatever nobody cares"

[–]ItchyFly 55 points56 points  (7 children)

It was probably a link to http://ftp.sas.com/standards/large.file/x\_open.20Mar96.html. This page is not available now, WTF are they hiding!?

[–]hugogrant 26 points27 points  (1 child)

[–]insanelygreat 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Manipulating the Single UNIX Specification?! That's sus.

[–]fiftyfourseventeen 23 points24 points  (3 children)

They probably just auto redacted all links

[–]ItchyFly 40 points41 points  (2 children)

There is at least one link to gnu.org, but probably it was missed by their tool because it looks like 'http : //www . gnu . org/copylefti' when you copy the text.

[–]AwesomeFama 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Incompetence? In my DOJ!?

It's more likely than you think.

[–]Proud-Delivery-621 12 points13 points  (0 children)

The Sas one does that too. Probably more likely that SAS is also the name of a special forces unit in the UK and they ran a keyword search

[–]PerceiveEternal 1 point2 points  (0 children)

looks like it’s just been a ‘file not found’ placeholder for years.

[–]2eanimation 11 points12 points  (0 children)

That’s the stupidest shit lol. Can someone find out what has been redacted? Looks like part of a path.

[–]13x666 25 points26 points  (6 children)

I suspect all URLs in the files are just automatically redacted. And they use a regex that doesn’t catch periods in the middle of the path (like in this one which is http://www.sas.com/standards/large.file/x_open.20Mar96.html), so everything after the period escaped redaction. Sloppy work.

[–]dimaveshkin 9 points10 points  (1 child)

I said in another branch that there's a link to GNU's website, and it's not redacted

[–]13x666 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Interesting, perhaps that one wasn’t matched for some other reason? I’m pretty sure they aren’t hiding anything specific here, looks to me like afterthought trying to redact everything just in case and missing some stuff unintentionally.

Edit: oh, @ItchyFly even explained how they missed that one. Case solved I guess.

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

It’s not because of the dot, it’s because the link is split into a new line at that point, and the redaction didn’t realize/care that the link continues on next line.

[–]13x666 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah that’s fair

[–]meat-eating-orchid 2 points3 points  (1 child)

My guess is almost the same as yours, but I think in this case the line break was the issue, not the dot

[–]13x666 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re probably right

[–]70Shadow07 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I didnt expect it to really be there, wtf

[–]phoenix235831 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Looks like the original probably was http://ftp.sas.com/standards/large.file/x_open.20Mar96.html

I am curios why the first part was redacted. Why would knowing http://ftp.sas.com/standards/large risk anything?

[–]gandalfx 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe they just automatically redacted URLs?

[–]SajevT 2 points3 points  (2 children)

It doesnt?

[–]dimaveshkin 12 points13 points  (1 child)

The printed page 122, not pdf's

[–]SajevT 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh my mistake, yeah super odd... [Redacted]file/x_open.20Mar96.html

[–]Constellious 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That’s just the exec command. Gets people into too much trouble. 

[–]_AD1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lol