this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Trying to get tech illiterate people to use LibreOffice and to export their documents as PDF but they just keep sending the original files every single time... nightmare material
"Don't use that proprietary format ! Use PDF instead !"
PDF is also an issue.
There are often also accessibility issues with PDF files depending on how they were created.
For best results, print your word doc and scan it back in on a flatbet scanner. Fun fact you don't even need to keep the piece of paper square to the scanner.
Or just take a picture of your monitor and text it.
Hire a barbershop quartet to sing it to them.
Unrelated anecdote, my brother's then wife post a picture of them on Facebook. Our aunt saw it, took a picture of her monitor with her phone, went to the store to have them print the photo out on photo paper, and then mailed it to my brother.
So he got his original photo back, but at a greatly reduced quality and with monitor glare added!
PDF can be opened anywhere, that's my point.
* Only if you dont use the many still proprietary extensions of PDF I suppose.
Anyway I'm not sure following the Adobe standard in our institutions is the smartest move.
Not solely, but since sooooo many documents are already only available in PDF, you need to support it for backwards compat alone, plus all the people who just wouldn't migrate their data to a new format because the old one still works for them.
I'd love if there were a true open standard with the same capabilities and support, but you're not gonna get companies to adopt that out of the kindness of their hearts.
Do you have a better idea, pal?
This is a conversation about the issue of proprietary formats in our institutions.
And I think PDF is a problem in that regard. It's not fully open and the format still can break. Forms in particular are still very problematics. Forms are very useful in institutions...
In college my professor wouldn't accept pdfs for assignments because I guess he couldn't check the metadata or make comments or something.
So I literally had to download MS office just to submit assignments in their format...
There are some people who míght learn from a ransomware attack. Only if it personally hits them, of course.
I don't know enough to understand the connection. Can you please explain?
Ransomware attack are successful mostly against MS Active Directory and Ourlook based setups.
That's hilarious. Big corporation apparently can't afford basic cybersecurity. Always pinching pennies.
Anyway, any big organization should encrypt their core systems to prevent ransomware attacks. Individuals should too. It's just good practice.
Encryption alone won't prevent ransomware to encrypt it again. The original files need to be readable after all, so they are either unencrypted at boot or appear unencrypted to the (infected) client by machine/session key management. Nevertheless, adding an addittional, ""hostile" encryption layer will make them unreadable. The reasonable thing would be not to use a monocultural, standard setup that is known to be vulnerable to that kind of attack and first of all to get rid of fucking Outlook which has always been a dumpster fire.
Oh man, I always thought if your drive was already encrypted that a hostile actor couldn't encrypt it for ransomware. I don't know where I read that but it was a long time ago and I guess someone lied to me, but it's whatever.
So what's the vulnerability that would be exploited, something about using the swap space to get into the encrypted drive? Or does the attack apply to the outside of the container? I'm curious cause I'm working on hardening my own system currently and I want to make sure I'm not leaving any gaps in my blind spots
Damn, I was gonna say just use web version, but they do often have missing features compared to app, so I understand why you had to download it...
The web version is even worse! It's all cloud-based, and you need a subscription unless your University pays for a license.
The only reason to use it would be to write things in Libre and then copy/paste them into MS and manually fix all the formatting.
I hated it, because all the professors could just smugly say "You know you have free access to Office 365 with your student email, right?"
That's not the fucking point! I don't give a shit if it's free, I don't want to use a fucking microsoft product, especially one that's cloud-based, when there's a perfectly good open-source alternative that I can run locally on my own hardware.
Just one of the many problems with the corporatization, commodification, and enshittification of education. If the focus was on learning and academic freedom, FOSS solutions would be encouraged. But no, you're forced to use proprietary software, because "~~reasons~~" capitalism...
You don't actually need a subscription for the cloud web version actually. It's ass though.