Guides
Practical writing on redaction: the failures that made the news, a checklist for PDFs, and why blur is not enough for images.
Why black boxes fail: redaction mistakes
Courts, ministries and companies keep publishing documents whose redactions come off with a copy-and-paste. The failures follow a few patterns.
6 min read — Updated June 2026
How to redact a PDF properly: a checklist
Rasterise, drop the text layer, clear metadata, strip attachments and comments, kill the revision history, then prove it with text extraction.
7 min read — Updated August 2026
Redacting screenshots: why blur is not enough
Blur and pixelation keep part of the signal, swirls can be unwound, and the EXIF thumbnail may still hold the original. Solid fill, then flatten.
6 min read — Updated July 2026
