Josh Babcock wrote:
> OK, so I ordered some flight manuals on CD from eflightmanuals.com,
> but what they didn't tell me is that they send them in a proprietary
> encryption scheme for PDF files that requires Windows ME of later
> which I don't have. According to the encryption software manufacturers
> it is AES 256 bit (FIPS-197) Now, I have the key of course, the
> question is how would I go about decrypting it in the absense of the
> proprietary software? Oh, There is also a second key for the software,
> probably tied to the specific machine it will be run on, I think I can
> sniff this with snort.

Print it to a PostScript file and ps2pdf the output.  Worked for me
for the Mustang POH (but sadly now I can't find the result file, and
the computer on which I installed the key has long since been
reinstalled; it'll turn up somewhere, I'm sure).  I think it might
have been slightly more complicated; I ended up doing something like
printing it to a samba printer on a linux box and grabbing the file
out of the spool directory, or somesuch.

As far as eflightmanuals.com goes, I'll agree that he's a little slow.
But the prices aren't awful, and the service is generally pretty
valuable, given that most of these things are not available online.

Note that he obviously *doesn't* own the copyright on the original
works*, so I'm not sure of the level of protection he's legally
afforded by the encrypted PDF.

* Which, at least for the US airplanes, are government documents and
  therefore uncopyrightable.  The only legal restriction on their
  distribution would be their security classification, AFAIK.  IANAL,
  blah blah blah.

Andy



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