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An Anonymous Coward writes:

MAT, "composed of a GUI application, a CLI application and a library, to anonymize/remove metadata," is a very useful tool[1] found in Tails[2] Linux and in the Debian Packages.[3]

MAT leader, 'julien voisin'[4], said on the MAT mailing list[5], "If someone wants to take over the maintenance/leadership, I'll be happy to do my very best to help him/her."[6]

MAT has been under scrutiny recently, including a web page which says, "We took a closer look at the Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit and found a security problem."[7], in Debian Bug reports "mat doesn't remove metadata in embedded images in PDFs"[8],[9],[10], lists,[11] and a recent Debian Security Advisory[12]:

"Hartmut Goebel discovered that MAT, a toolkit to anonymise/remove metadata from files did not remove metadata from images embededed in PDF documents. For the stable distribution (jessie), this problem has been fixed in version 0.5.2-3+deb8u1. This update disables PDF support in MAT entirely. We recommend that you upgrade your mat packages."

On jvoisin's blog, "The current version has bugs, and doesn't work on Python3, I wouldn't advise anyone to use it"[13], "developers: if you want to maintain MAT, I'll be happy to do my very best to help you, but I don't feel like reviewing and merging patches, sorry."

Please say a kind word to jvoisin and if you have the skills and ability, arrange with jvoisin for a clean transition of leadership so MAT doesn't end here.

[1] https://mat.boum.org/ [boum.org]
[2] https://tails.boum.org/ [boum.org]
[3] https://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=sourcenames&keywords=mat [debian.org]
[4] julien.voisin@dustri.org *or* jvoisin on irc.oftc.net
[5] https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/mat-dev [boum.org]
[6] https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/mat-dev/2016-October/000126.html [boum.org]
[7] https://digitalcourage.de/blog/2016/using-tails-be-careful-embedded-metadata [digitalcourage.de]
[8] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=826101 [debian.org]
[9] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839068 [debian.org]
[10] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=mat [debian.org]
[11] https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-privacy-maintainers/Week-of-Mon-20160919/001023.html [debian.org]
[12] https://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3708 [debian.org]
[13] http://dustri.org/b/mat-is-currently-on-hold.html [dustri.org]

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