US, UK nuclear submarine secrets accidentally published online

An improperly redacted PDF has resulted in the accidental release of British and American nuclear submarine secrets.

A “technical error” has caused Britain’s Ministry of Defense to inadvertently publish classified sections of a report containing sensitive information about US Navy and British military nuclear submarines, the BBC reports.

Sensitive information in the report, which was published to Parliament’s website after a Freedom of Information request by anti-nuclear campaigners, includes how much structural damage British subs can take before a full meltdown takes place, as well as US vessels’ abilities to handle nuclear core failure.

The “schoolboy error,” as the MoD has called it, was due to improper redaction in the PDF document. As British tabloid the Daily Star Sunday, which first reported the gargantuan slip-up, points out, “anyone wanting to read the censored sections just had to copy the text.” This was most likely because whomever attempted to redact the document did so with the digital black highlighter, which simply covers up, rather than fully redacts, the text in a PDF.

British MP Patrick Mercer, who served in the country’s Army, said the leaked info could have “potentially catastrophic” results because the revealed information was “highly interesting” to the UK’s enemies.

Immediately after the Daily Star Sunday‘s report, the MoD removed the over-sharing document with a properly redacted one, and thanked the press for pointing out their error.

“The MoD is grateful to the journalist for bringing this matter to our attention,” said an MoD spokesman. “As soon as we were told about this, we took steps to ensure the document was removed from the public domain and replaced by a properly redacted version (PDF). We take nuclear security very seriously and we are doing everything possible to prevent a recurrence of this.”

Obviously, one simple way to avoid such a scenario in the future is to use an actual marker, rather than a digital one, to black-out text that should not be shared with the entire world.

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ESRB switches to computer automated process for online game ratings

The video game industry's Entertainment Software Ratings Board institutes a new computer automated process which will assign ratings to certain games based on the results of a questionnaire filled out by each game's publisher.

UPDATE: The ESRB press office reached out and offered further explanation on how the new process will work, and this post has now been updated accordingly.

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board is the U.S. video game industry’s self-regulatory organization responsible for assigning age ratings to releases and ensuring that all advertising sticks to established guidelines. The industry’s growth in recent years has placed a strain on the ESRB’s ability to rate everything, which is a serious problem when you consider that the big three console makers, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, don’t allow unrated game releases on their platforms.

As a result of this, the ratings board is implementing a new system designed to automate some of the process, at the same time placing a great deal of trust in game publishers. Starting today, “the main evaluation of hundreds of games each year” will be relegated to a computer-managed questionnaire “meant to gauge every subtle nuance of violence, sexuality, profanity, drug use, gambling and bodily function that could possibly offend anyone,” The New York Times reports.

The idea now is that publishers will fill out this questionnaire and a computer will analyze the responses across multiple categories to assign a proper rating. Presumably there will be a human somewhere late in the process to double-check the results as well, but the bulk of the work will be done by computers. There is an expectation is that game publishers will report on each game’s content honestly, and really, it behooves them to do so considering that an incorrectly rated game will be caught quickly enough by Internet watchdogs.

The ESRB’s director of communications Eliot Mizrachi told Digital Trends, “Each game will be tested within the first 24-48 hours of availability, and there is an enforcement mechanism by which we can affect changes to ratings that were assigned based on incomplete disclosure. There are consequences for failing to properly disclose content during the rating process.”

The questions run through all of the usual content red flags, including profanity, sexuality, gambling, drug use and so on. It seems to be very detailed too, with profanity, for example, being broken down into six categories: minor profanities, epithets, scatological vulgarities, racial obscenities, sexual vulgarisms and “a final category devoted to one particular three-letter word that refers to both a beast of burden and, colloquially, to a part of human anatomy.” There’s also a section on bodily functions, which asks about ” flatulence sounds, ‘whimsical depictions of feces,’ realistically depicted feces and the ‘act of human (or humanlike character) defecation visually depicted.’”

Major retail releases will still be subjected to the ESRB’s traditional review process. Many do not know this, but the large part of that process never actually puts a game controller into the hands of a ratings classifier. Instead, publishers send over video compilations of game footage meant to highlight the most ratings-relevant moments in a forthcoming release. So ultimately, it’s not such a huge stretch for the ESRB to now be trusting publishers to accurately report on the content of a particular game, since that is what’s been happening all along.

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