> it's completely free open access

Why are the PDFs individually watermarked?

It seems antithetical to the spirit of releasing a book about Tor and "future of privacy", and to then not only watermark each PDF, but to not explicitly state that this is the case, let alone explain why.

And several analytics type of tracking pixels on the page as well. Not a big deal nor likely controllable by the author.

It's the mit press who's publishing it no? I very highly doubt the author has access to tracking decisions made by the org putting the work out.

I initially read this as there being tracking pixels in the PDF. I'm hate that I have to ask this, but are tracking pixels a thing in the PDF format? (Execluding embedded js, ofc)

Can PDFs be crafted such that they would ping remote servers when opened in most PDF viewers?

Watermark? In the original link the thread is based on, there is no watermarks, its probably something the publisher that sells is just happens to do.

I agree it seems a bit scummy, yet likely unavoidable for the author due to the way MIT Press distributes things.

It's thankfully licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, which allows for converting the content to other formats (given attribution and non-commercial use, same license, etc etc) [0]. I'd reckon that making a de-fingerprinted version and redistributing it as an epub, md, or pdf again would be allowed, then.

As for getting a clean copy to work from, using Tor would be quite fitting. I plan to convert the version I downloaded to epub for ereader use, maybe downloading it a couple times over different routes and combining to see if that has any impact on the fingerprinting. I'll comment with a download if I get to that and feel it's of a quality worth sharing.

0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en#re...