Unfortunately that wouldn't work as this is information inside the PDF itself so it has nothing to do with the file hash (although that is one way to track.)

Now that this is known, It's not enough to remove metadata from the PDF itself. Each image inside a PDF, for example, can contain metadata. I say this because they're apparently starting a game of whack-a-mole because this won't stop here.

There are multiple ways of removing ALL metadata from a PDF, here are most of them.

It will be slow-ish and probably make the file larger, but if you're sharing a PDF that only you are supposed to have access to, it's worth it. MAT or exiftool should work.

Edit: as spoken about in another comment thread here, there is also pdf/image steganography as a technique they can use.

Who was that guy that discovered something very important in physics, and he said the elves told him about it? The elves that were in the massive holes/caves he would dig in his back property, as his outlet. I forget how large his friends said the tunnels were, but he clearly spent a lot of time digging tunnels.

Edit: Seymour Cray, of the Cray supercomputer. AKA The Father of Supercomputing.

John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said.

Cray has been called solitary, uncommunicative, secretive, and difficult to get on with. Frank Sumner, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester, met Cray on several occasions and refutes suggestions that he was a prickly character: "He was a very friendly man, and perhaps the greatest all-round computer scientist ever", says Sumner.

Opiates. Often and overly.

DO NOT MISS A DOSE!

Pizza Meter but in the style of NCD. It was largely an urban legend, allegedly, but maybe it being an urban legend is an urban legend.

A guy made a website that monitors restaurant orders in DC, posted a year ago and it's down now... I wonder if he got a friendly knock and talk or just didn't want to pay hosting any longer.

Friendly reminder that Bluetooth has a larger network stack than Wi-Fi. Much more code, much larger available attack base. There have been many numerous Bluetooth vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution or theft of files.

This is truly becoming a surveillance state, in no way that can be debated. That want to be able to access everyone's innermost thoughts (texts, notes, recordings, calendars, contacts, photos, you get it) without any chance of someone being able to protect against it.

Reminder that Google was the 2nd or 3rd company to commit to NSA's PRISM program of feeding American's data for future analysis.

Mass centralization. Old school forums like phpBB and SMF and vBulletin and new-school forums like self-hosted discourse are also centralized, but by one small user calling the shots, and it's very clear immediately which forums are well-run. If a forum isn't well-run with a good community, a 'competitor' will quickly pop up that is, and people will go to it. Sure, you have to have some tech skills but there are easy guides for all of it. Discourse is a simple docker image and it's the best for features and engagement IMO.

Sure you have to sorry about DDoS attacks and staying patched, but you can use OVH or another host with a large infrastructure that had DDoS resistant servers. Or, god forbid, cloudflare.

I could be way overanalyzing this

You're not overanalyzing it. You're Wayyyyy overanalyzing it to a detrimental degree.

Even if you did take them back, and the pharmacy made a log of it, it would just be in their internal pharmacy 'drugs to destroy' log and wouldn't be sent to the state or anywhere else to update your records.

All they see is that you were prescribed a very small amount of a low dose pain medication once after a surgery and you picked it up. Something thousands of people do every single day.

It's not that important. You're not going to be red-flagged because your doctor/surgeon wrote a prescription and you picked it up.

You only get flagged as a drug seeker for drug-seeking behavior. That does not include picking up a small prescription for a few pain meds a doctor wrote for you after minor surgery. If it did, anyone who's ever had a root canal or tooth pulled would be flagged and the system would be useless.

100%. I've been saying it over and over. It's election season on the internet, division aplenty.

That seems to be the case, probably a killswitch-type feature, ensuring the VPN is working. Additionally, addr[.]cx is a free GeoIP lookup service, and I assume bigbrolook (OP - Big Brother is a term for a surveillance state, the porn definition is only used for 5-10 years) is/was another one. You can confirm with waybackmachine.

Seems to be an amateur free VPN using free infrastructure. Most of the time the free VPNs that turn their users machines into a proxy or do other dirty things will be obfuscated and require at least a bit of reverse engineering, not just opening a debugger and peeking.

Not trying to cast shade here, but isn't a master's thesis after you know a subject incredibly well, and aren't you supposed to look at things no one has looked at before? In case you're not in tech and this is a master's for another subject, this has been done.

My hope is that the FBI asked them to shut this down on NSA's behalf, so threat actors feel more comfortable as they aren't being watched, studied, and analyzed by every OSINT collective in existence.

My fear is that they know what happened the previous 2 elections and this year will be the worst yet, and they don't want their users knowing how badly they got duped and feeling bad/dumb enough to leave the platform. Also advertising $$.

I would put Mullvad and IVPN up there as the two VPNs I'd trust most to do things right, but I still agree with everything you've said.

Considering this was 1956, I would imagine "secret reasons" was used where we would use "personal reasons" today.

Or Mr. White was drunk.