"Holy F*ck, this has to be THE funniest thing I’ve read all day. Copy and frickin’ paste revealed the details? Hilarious. Woe is me for Facebook - finally, everyone knows its real worth. How were they monetizing anyway? And how can the wonderboy be worth more than his site? Oops, did I just say that out loud? Sidenote: I hope this comment is cached just in case my Facebook gets deactivated for talking so much crap. ha." <--the comment I left on TC. - Mona Nomura from Bookmarklet

Inspired use of Picard facepalm - Mo Kargas

Seriously, you guys HAVE to read this. I LOLd. - Mona Nomura from IM

Oh I know it was hillarous - Justin Yost

wow... just wow.. ;) - Chris Hollander

I left the rudest comment on there - hopefully my Facebook doesn't get deactivated LOL - Mona Nomura from IM

That is some 007 shit! hahhaaaahhaaaa & yes beware the deactivation - sofarsoShawn

I wonder if it was the 'Track Changes/View Final' function in MS Word that tripped them up? - Mel Buckpitt

@Mel: Probably just "black text on black background" -fail - Jemm

Nothing to see here: <strike>redacted</strike> - Micah Wittman

Or maybe a layer in a PDF. Anybody know if the doc is online? - Ken Sheppardson

wow that is seriously pathetic. MS word and other word processing apps keep "versions" of "undo history".. sounds like somebody forget to set the versions to 0 none. This was something we used to do when I was working in legal for state farm, DA, FBI, etc - Susan Beebe

It almost sounds like they just highlighted the black text using a black highlight in the electronic version, assuming that because it would print out black on black there's NO possible way someone could ever read what was in the redacted portions. - Brian Chang

Is that $8.88/share price some Chinese numerology at work or just a coincidence? - Andrew C

ANDREW! LOL!! - Mona Nomura from IM

i agree with Mo here. Inspired!! - Roberto Bonini

... was the technical screw-up the court's, or ConnectU's lawyers, or what? - Andrew C

If you read the SF Gate article TC linked, as well as the original piece from AP, they all state it was from the transcripts. Since I am not familiar with the legal system, I can not definitively say whose fault it was. - Mona Nomura from IM

Well, I figured, but the article also mentioned a leak from ConnectU's lawyers. - Andrew C

The court and the lawyers from both parties most likely were given a copy of the full, unredacted transcript. Facebook and ConnectU might have received full versions as well, though if anything discussed in the proceedings involved either company's agreements or other business dealings with third parties, they may have only gotten redacted versions to prevent the other side from seeing confidential insider information. In theory, the blunder could have come from any of the three or a combination thereof. - Brian Chang

lesson learned: you don't redact stuff by covering them in black in Acrobat. The US DoD made the same thing a few years ago by releasing a redacted report about an incident in Iraq that involved the death of an italian officer... open in Acrobat, copy, paste... voilà. - dario

Glad you rember, dario :-) - Gianluca Neri

Copy and Paste? LOL! - Nestor

Picard pic...inspired! - Hutch Carpenter

@dario: lesson *wasn't* learned, was it? - geoff holmes

@geoff: apparently, it wasn't! (Gianluca: ho buona memoria ;)) - dario

Guess they never saw this article: http://bit.ly/2t8Qv FBI did the same thing a while back. - Thomas Hunsaker

Can I say how much I love the photo. Oh Number 1 what is it this time? - John Flynn

Is this copying and pasting to circumvent the redacting "DRM" a DMCA violation? Maybe the AP (and TechCrunch!) will wind up at gitmo... - Daniel J. Pritchett

the doc is here [http://docs.justia.com/cases...] this is an old 'feature' in PDF. i expect the legal folks to have figured this out by now. pretty sad. - MikeAmundsen

Daniel, Part of that info was already "published" by ConnectU's lawyers. http://friendfeed.com/e... - Tapio Kulmala

the Bush Defense Dept exercised this 'feature' of redacted PDFs back in 2006: [http://www.strozllc.com/files...] - MikeAmundsen

This calls for law on how software providers can enable/unable confidentail information stored in programs vis-a-vis terms of use of electronic documents. - Moses Kpetigo

As hard as I try, I can't quite picture how some new law would help. - Ken Sheppardson