Unfortunately Joost had to find out the hard way today that converting a PowerPoint presentation to a PDF is not always a good idea. Joost apparently released a presentation called “Joost-network.pdf” that discusses Joost’s Network Architecture and gives an overview of how they work. The link to the PDF was even found in Joost’s very own forum.
The interesting thing is on page 16 of the PDF where there is some hidden text located behind a PowerPoint slide. Of course, all text (even if covered by an image) is always selectable in Acrobat as you can see in the screenshot above. So what’s all the hidden text?
It appears that it is a list of deals that they are pushing to close as of March 15. The list is broken up into several categories including: Animation, Comedy, Documentaries, Entertainment, Film, Lifestyle, Music, News, and Sports. In all, there are 61 companies listed which includes: Oxygen, Sony, Warner Brothers, and EMI. I know I know, you want to see the whole list. Well, it is quite long so I just stored it as an image and shrunk it down:
Mashable was the first to find out about this hidden list, and they said that it could be possible that it was edited by a third party. They said that probably isn’t very likely though.
There is more hidden information on other slides as well:
- Slide 3 contains general information
- Slide 6 contains information about “the current situation” which covers their existing deals.
- Slide 8 contains information on “3–month Priorities: Overall”
- Slide 9 contains information on “3–month Priorities: UK”
- Slide 10 contains information on “3–month Priorities: USA”
- Slide 12 contains information on “3–month Priorities: Music”
- Slide 13 contains information on “3–month Priorities: Sports”
- Slide 18 says “And finally…some info on the Viacom Deal” but doesn’t really have anything else.
You can download the Joost-network PDF yourself to uncover the rest of the information, and I recommend using Adobe Acrobat to view the PDF because it didn’t want to work with Foxit. After you have it open just select the cursor tool, and press Ctrl+A on each slide to highlight the text. Then copy it into another program such as Microsoft Word.
So what do you think about the possible partnerships, do they have some on there that would be exciting to see? Are there some that should still be added to the list?
Enjoyed the post? Subscribe to our feed to get a daily dose of CyberNet!
Tags: Freeware, Software, Joost
Related Posts:
- Joost Steps Out into Public Beta 1.0
- Joost May Get a Boost with VH1 Unprecedented Arrangement
- Joost Getting Ready For the Web
- What do you think of Joost?
- Is Comcast Blocking Joost Already?
Or maybe they knew exactly what they were doing and decided to “leak” this info to the users. I doubt that the guys who created Kazaa, Skype and now Joost didn’t know that this would happen if they tried converting a ppt to a pdf file. Even if they didn’t know that this would happen, wouldn’t they check to make sure the conversion went smoothly before posting it up in their forum? I don’t think that’s something they would have missed. Thirdly, why would they hide information in a presentation they were planning on releasing to the public? I imagine they would have removed it instead of hiding it. Something seems fishy.
I would have thought that they would remove it as well, but if they were like me and used Foxit (or another PDF reader) they would have thought that the text was completely hidden because only Acrobat seems to recognize it. I’m just wondering how it came about that this information ended up in the PDF, because just trying to cover it up seemed too easy. Unless they were trying to make it available to some people and was kind of their way of encrypting it?
My dad owns a graphics business and gets people who send him files made very poorly all the time. when he goes to open up something in Adobe Illustrator, you find out they tried to hide a bunch of crap behind behind/in front of the image.
it may look right to them in their program, but once you open it in Illustrator it changes completely.
I wonder why people are so lazy that they just try to hide the stuff. I would never think to do that, just delete it for goodness sakes.
Heck, just make a duplicate of the file, delete the information you don’t want available, and then publish it. It’s really not that hard.