…it’s safe to say that Pam Bondi’s DoJ did not put its best and brightest on this (admittedly gargantuan) undertaking
Actually they did. It’s just that their best and brightest are fairly dim.
Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
Submitted 1 day ago by apftwb@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://neosmart.net/blog/recreating-epstein-pdfs-from-raw-encoded-attachments/
Comments
Manjushri@piefed.social 1 day ago
regedit@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
It could also have been incompetence as a form of resistance, for all we know, or a combination of both.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
This. If I didn’t agree with what they’re doing (and I don’t) and I wanted to resist I would do my best to steer towards a reversible redaction method. Then just feign ignorance.
BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Their best and brightest were fired or retired.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Well it’s all the leftovers at this point. When the priority is loyalty, performance suffers.
itsathursday@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Amazing what a bit of knowledge, intelligence and competency can achieve.
wuffah@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Inversely, it’s also amazing what a lack thereof cannot achieve, for instance, redacting publicized documents.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
Literally stop publicizing this stuff until they’ve shown their entire hands
Kissaki@feddit.org 6 hours ago
forgetting to redact credentials that made it possible for all of Reddit to log into Epstein’s account and trample over all the evidence
/o\ 🤦
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Part of me wants to think this fuck up was on purpose.
schwim@piefed.zip 1 day ago
I am not intelligent enough to understand any of it but that was a fun read.
TIL the origin of Courier.
kescusay@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Long story short:
- Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
- The way attachments work in emails is that they’re converted to encoded text.
- That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
- So it’s theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.
Source: I’m a software developer and I’m currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
proudblond@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Godspeed friend
apftwb@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m a software developer and I’m currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
🫡
apftwb@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Are you having as much trouble with OCR as the article author? I would have thought OCR was a solved problem in 2026 even with poor fonts.
trolololol@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Curious here, this is base 64? And what’s behind it is more often than not an image or text? And you need to do ocr to get the characters?
Maybe for the text it could use a dictionary to rubber stamp whether that zero is actually a letter oh, etc etc?
I’m curious to know what the challenge is and what your approach is.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
There’s an iOS game about the history of fonts you might enjoy. Struggling to find it at the moment, but you play a colon navigating through time, solving various puzzles.
regedit@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
I’m failing to understand why or how a part of the large intestine would time travel, nor why it would be bothered to solve puzzles! 🤔
nomecks@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
We just need those 76 page base64 printouts stuffed into captcha so we can crowdsource cracking them
Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org 16 hours ago
I actually like this idea a lot
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
crowdsource, not crowdfund. One is sharing the work, the other is sharing the cost.
hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
I tried to leave a comment, but it doesn’t seem to be showing up there.
I’ll just leave it here:
too tired to look into this, one suggestion though - since the hangup seems to be comparing an L and a 1, maybe you need to get into per-pixel measurements. This might be necessary if the effectiveness of ML or OCR models isn’t at least 99.5% for a document containing thousands of ambiguous L’s. Any inaccuracies from an ML or OCR model will leave you guessing 2^N candidates which becomes infeasible quickly. Maybe reverse engineering the font rendering by creating an exact replica of the source image? I trust some talented hacker will nail this in no time.
RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
How big is N though?
Qwaffle_waffle@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
64
hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
Since there’s 78 pages, I’m guessing at least 1 ambiguity per page? Anyways, it’s dreadfully big.
mEEGal@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Asking the real questions
BlackLaZoR@fedia.io 1 day ago
Interesting in few weeks we might end up with some additional unredacted documents
regedit@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
But knowing the sick fucks in these files, possible child-related content…
nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 1 day ago
Fun fact: this guy uses fish shell.
E_coli42@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Source? I’ve seen the bash reference manual in the files
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The article author. And they state it explicitly in the footnotes.
mbp@lemmy.sdf.org 12 hours ago
Hell yeah, fish is great
Sounds like he also maintains it
random_character_a@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Has anyone checked if it’s just black text on a black background. That would be in line with the competence level of the Donnie’s administration.
fiat_lux@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.
jj4211@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Some of the reactions are some in an effective way, and I assume this example is one of them. The problem being evidently they didn’t think any what might be in big base64 blobs in the PDF, and I guess some of these folks somehow had their email encoded as PDF, which seems bonkers…
YetAnotherNerd@sopuli.xyz 22 hours ago
Some email programs did that, especially when there was special formatting involved. I seem to recall Thunderbird doing it in the past, as well as outlook.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
had their email encoded as PDF
Doesn’t compute, please explain.
magnetosphere@fedia.io 1 day ago
I need an ELI5 version of this. (Note: this is a critique of me, not the author or the content of the article.)
apftwb@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Some of the Epstein emails were released as scanned PDFs of raw email format (see MIME)
MIME formatted emails are ASCII based. To include an attachments, which can be binary, the MIME format specifies it must be encodes it using base64. Base64 can always take binary input and return an ASCII output. This is trivial to reverse if you have the ASCII output.
I’m a bit confused by the article only discussing extracting PDFs while in actuality you can reverse any attachment including images.
I am also no expert, so a smarter person will now correct me on anything I got wrong.
Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Its correct
Why the pdfs contain “wrong letters” though, i havent a clue
regedit@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
I’m a bit confused by the article is only discussing extracting PDFs while in actuality you can reverse any attachment including images.
I could see them not mentioning other types of attachments due to the subject matter underpinning the reasons for these documents in the first place. Most pervs wouldn’t be bothered to put effort into boring PDFs, but might put in more effort for CSAM images.
Not mentioning that this could be done for all attachment types was probably intentional.
toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
This is really great, dont tell this to anyone!
They are still releasing more parts of the Epstein files!
Take the advice of Napoleon: Never interrupt the enemy while they are making a mistake!
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
yeah, I’m always a bit annoyed when people laught at the incompetence.
Let them.
Heck, some of it might even be intentional. Don’t take away tools for leakers