Lyndon said:
>>Could we make it where it's read only (not downloadable) on the web site?
>Not possible with the internet. In any form (pdf, html, ascii, ebcidic, etc),
>once you open and read it on your own computer, the binary reprentation of the
>text is transferred from the TSA web server to your computer. From there, you
>can copy it and distribute it "wontanly".
This is definitely true, even for things that people thought they had
cleverly protected from downloading or printing. For example, some free trial
versions of programs allow one to use their functionality but not to save or
print the results. I have several of those. If I want to keep the results, I
simply make a screen shot and then paste that into a blank image in an image
manipulation program (IrfanView <http://www.irfanview.com/> is a good free
one). I can then select only the relevant portion of the screen shot and paste
that into a new blank image to get my results free of extraneous headers,
borders, etc. Very quick and easy, and the resulting image can be printed or
whatever. About the only thing this doesn't cover is making the copied text
searchable or manipulable, and there are even ways to do that with OCR
programs. Once it's on your screen, it's yours to keep if you want it.
Another trick for keeping things that are not supposed to be savable is
to find the copy in your computer's cache. When you download anything using a
web browser your computer almost always keeps a copy. That's why you can
refresh or revisit the page and it comes back up very rapidly. Generally that
cached copy is hidden away deep in some obscure system or program folder, but
if you can find it, you can copy it. I used to to that with YouTube videos,
which do not have an obvious mechanism for saving them. One way to find those
obscure cahed files is to search for files based on date/time. If it's the
last thing you did, it will generally be one of the last couple of files saved.
Where there's a will, there's a way. :-)
Mark Minton
