Confidential Document Print Suppression in Curl applets

Over at developers.curl.com I have added a blog post on preventing the printing of material presented in a Curl applet.

One simple technique given in that example is to exploit the media attribute of the CSS style element.

I have a more elaborate working example of suppressing screen capture at LogiqueWerks.com where the user is mouse-and-keyboard constrained.

Dealing with actual camera capture of text material is another matter, but if the user hopes for quick transfer of a snapshot to PDF and then extraction with OCR, you can impede that by an overlay or a background.  In the case of Adobe, including marginal text in tiny font wrecks havoc with its text generation as does a zero margin with a visible border in a thickness near that of the letter "I" or "l".  An overlay with graphical lines is also somewhat effective in defeating OCR.

After that, anything eye-only is only as secure as the person viewing the material - in the presence of your lawyers and without cellphones, computing tablets and Q.

Heidegger and Cassirer

Over at phil.aule-browser.com/truth.htm I have a series of links to Curl versions of an eText: Heidegger's "On the Essence of Truth" in John Sallis' English translation (the Curl RTE browser plugin is required to view these pages as an eBook.)

A more interesting version might juxtapose the Heidegger of 1929-1945 with Ernst Cassirer.

It is clear from the Freiburg Inaugural lecture through the lectures of 1930 and 1932 which comprise the 1943 "The Essence of Truth" that Husserl is not the target.  Heidegger had effectively disposed of Jaspers of Heidelberg in his 1927 "Sein und Zeit" and may have imagined that he would dispose of Einstein in a second volume.  The remaining target was Cassirer in Hamburg.

Cassirer's 1923 first volume of his "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" opens with the concept of "being".  That volume closes with what may be a clue to the Heidegger opus: "wisan".  What we have here is not just a Heidegger pun on "Wesen" but a clue to Heidegger's language and philological idiosyncracies: only in emerging in the opening that is the historic "facing" (in my interpretation, the Warrior out of concealment, onto the field of battle or the lover emerging from her dissimulations in clothing, manner, attitude) that in victory or defeat we become known as what we were (the destined great nation, the destined lover, geworfen, geschicht.)

Another clue is in the Cassirer quote from Plato's "Sophist" on "koinon ton genos" when placed in contrast to "koinon genos" in Section 6 of the Heidegger essay with its emphasis on sophistry.

That Husserl is simply side-stepped should be clear from the 1943 publication blithely ignoring the Landgrebe edition of "Erfahrung u. Urteil" in Heidegger's short-schrift of any distinction of Satz and Urteil and his outrageous justoposition of Satz/Logos and later stated equivalence of "Aussage" and "Urteil".

Heidegger pun's should never be ignored any more than those of the wittier farceur, Sartre (Cassirer was known for his wit and prodigious memory.)  When Heidegger choses to speak of "Umweg" in connection with his "Frage" we cannot ignore "Umfrage" and the more obvious "Abstimmung" and "Einstimmung".

Heidegger's erudtion in history of philosphy far outstripped that of Husserl and in the late 1920's and early 1930's he had listened to enough of Jaspers on his visits to Heidelberg to know where he stood.  But in his years in Marburg, Cassirer had still been the legend (when Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg, Cassirer was still Rector of the new Hamburg University.)  In terms of background in mathematics and science, Heidegger had only his brief exposure after he left dogmatic Catholicism (his later pronouncements on electromagnetic wave propagation on German television are trully laughable when you consider Cassirer's own books on science and specifically on relativity (on an equal footing with Russell and Reichenbach.)

Of course the critical confrontation with Cassirer comes later, at Davos, but tools for annotating philosphical texts could help to illuminate what would otherwise remain obscure.

Poem annotations browser for International Day of Poetry: March 21

The usual thought is to take a generic browser and add a plugin so as to have a useful feature such as an annotation.  So you do that on your research PC.
Now you are sitting at the airport with your iPad.  Oops, that was a Firefox plugin and this is Safari (your annotation content wouldn't have been accessible to you on the web anyway ...)

If there is a poet who demands annotations it must be the author of these lines:

And then went down to the ship
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.

These lines, thus far, could be in HTML as ASCII text (although the font was to be something other than Monotype Bembo - which even this is not.)

Oh - this is not from Derek Walcott's Omeros.

But the poet in question sometimes included Chinese characters  and classical Greek in his poems ...