>PDF forgery is striking because it’d be so easy to do: find a useful research paper, edit it in any of the many PDF utilities, upload anywhere, wait for people to copy it (as they do), then take down yours; now you have an authoritative peer-reviewed research paper floating around the Internet with no links to you, in the perfect crime. (Or better yet: upload it directly to Libgen/Sci-Hub and let everyone else redistribute it.)
Seen as (unsigned) PDFs are basically images of documents, it's wild to claim that there are no forgeries, anyone doing a good ole fake document, fake diploma, fake wire transfer, fake articles of incorporation, etc... is using a pdf for faking. A nigerian prince scam sending an attachment mentioning 15.000.000$ locked up in inheritance would constitute a PDF forgery.
Gwern is talk about editing an existing pdf. Less so about creating one from scratch.
> There is plenty of incompetence, fraud, and malice online, often in PDFs… but only new PDFs. I can’t think of a single fraud accomplished by editing a real PDF & just uploading it for Google Scholar etc. or where I’ve been burned by even mislabeling.
Seen as (unsigned) PDFs are basically images of documents, it's wild to claim that there are no forgeries, anyone doing a good ole fake document, fake diploma, fake wire transfer, fake articles of incorporation, etc... is using a pdf for faking. A nigerian prince scam sending an attachment mentioning 15.000.000$ locked up in inheritance would constitute a PDF forgery.