I just had to do this dumb dance with TD Ameritrade. I did a coin toss on print/scan v.s. learning to do this with ImageMagick. Since I had a bunch of other deadlines to hit I wasted paper so they would accept my electronic submission.

Personally, from a workflow standpoint I'd prefer a PDF Printer driver that would add the effect. I'm sure the website is better for Mobile.

I reckon you could sell this, a PDF printer driver that fakes the "scanned" look

My biggest concern with an online service is privacy (either bad actors or the web app getting hacked). I used an online mortgage service that was fully paperless with the exception of a single document. Just ran it through a few imagemagick commands to add rotation, noise, contrast, etc. My home printer wasn't working so it was either that or buy a whole new one.

> My biggest concern with an online service is privacy

In this case it's all run client-side. You're still trusting that the code you're served wasn't maliciously replaced, but if you want to be careful you could run it in an incognito tab and temporarily disable your internet connection.

How would you download the payload without an internet connection?

Let's presume it is malicious, and the mere act of downloading the WASM starts an injection.

Ah, I was ambiguous about that, but I mean these steps:

1. load the site in an incognito tab

2. disable internet

3. run the conversion and download the result

4. close the incognito tab

5. re-connect the internet

While this may work for unsophisticated attacks, wouldn't it still be possible for a more sophisticated adversary to do something more like store the document in browser local storage, and then later with internet access to post the contents?

I haven't spent a huge amount of time in the browser security space, but I do think there is quite alot of surface area if you give the browser session sensitive data.

If you are using an incognito tab, anything in local storage, cookies, even caches should go away. I am not 100% up on the details but I believe modern browsers are pretty strict about isolating incognito state.

You're right though in general, that's why the incognito tab is important.

This is correct, but you need to close ALL incognito tabs for storage to get wiped, not just the tab you loaded the site in.

I mean, I considered this implied within the suggestion of using incognito mode.

In any event, it's an unrealistic attack vector. No bad actor is going to target 0.1% of edge cases when you could get enough damaging information from people who do not go through this process and remain connected to the internet.

Just making it clear for anyone that doesn't know. It's caught me off guard before.

That depends on the browser, I believe.

Did you try this? Does not work with FF 99 in a private tab on macOS 12, at least for me. It stays stuck at "Rendering finished, waiting for processing".

Are there browser extensions that simply disable all future requests from being sent from the immediate tab?

It's possible for an extension to intercept and block requests, but as Kevin mentions in your sibling comment, it's not enough because they could write data to local storage and then read it later when you're back online if you ever visited that domain again. An extension would have to cover a lot of bases to ensure that data couldn't leak, and I wouldn't trust one to cover them all.

In Chrome dev tools you can set the network throttling to "Offline".

In Firefox this is not possible (per tab), but at least you can set the entire browser to offline mode by clicking "File -> Work Offline"

In Chrome, open the Inspector, go to "Netork", then in the dropdown that says "No throttling" choose "offline".

That got weird fast (caution NSFW). It looks like an interesting project, but then it quickly devolved into a PDF filled with drawings of penises. Quite unexpected, glad I wasn't viewing it with my students in the room lol.

I still have to deal with bureaucracy that requires wet signatures. I've tried a few tools like this one, but no bueno. They could tell it was "digitally signed".

wet ink exists for a reason.

Some things are far too sensitive to ever touch a computer.