Windows 8.1 remembering PDF passwords

[Lucas Garron]

From the Osijek Open 2015 report by Olivér Perge:

"I just bought a new laptop literally the day before the competition and I was notfamiliar with Windows 8.1 and had very little programs installed. Long story short, for some reason, opening 1 PDF with the password allowed all the remaining PDFs to be opened without needing the password at all. I was very confused and uncomfortable with this, so I made sure that at least one of the scramblers was someone I trusted, and I also closed the laptop after every round, so the password for logging in was needed from me."

[Olivér Perge]

As it turned out, the problem could be solved very easily, had I installed Total Commander earlier. From that program it doesn't remember the passwords, but by opening it from the default folder it does for some weird reason.

In Windows 7 the same problem has never occured but with Windows 8.1 we tried it on another PC and it has produced the same issue.

From now on, I will use Total Commander to avoid any similar troubles in the future.

[Jeremy Fleischman]

That's very helpful of Windows 8.1.

It's very interesting to hear of the different ways people use TNoodle at competitions. I guess you have a laptop that anyone on staff is allowed to use, but it will only contain extracted scrambles for ongoing rounds? It's up to you to extract new scrambles before each round?

[Olivér Perge]

Yes, ever since Czech Open 2014, we never print out the scrambles, except for FMC of course. I think this is much safer than having the sheets there, which could be taken away by anybody, not to mention we don't waste paper nor ink.

We have a few conditions for our system, which has worked perfectly so far:

- only me and my partner can open a new group (as a default I open every group, except when I compete, then she will open it)

- the password has nothing to do with the name of the competition and has small and capital letters, numbers and sometimes a symbol too

- I always shut down my laptop when we don't use it for scrambling, so someone would have to crack that password too

- we don't send the .zip in e-mail to anyone, I use a flash drive for sharing the file between laptops

- when needed in bigger competitions (like Hungarian Open) we use 2 laptops at once

- we always have at least 1 person from our core team to look after the scramblers

- we always close the PDF which is not in use

I admit that sometimes they have to wait for me or Niki to open a file (since we run mostly small competitions it's not even a matter of minutes to get there) and also it is a bit annoying to have the last group on the desktop and wait for each other to finish when the last solves of a group overlaps the new one, but otherwise I think this works just fine.