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\ 🤦
Part of me wants to think this fuck up was on purpose.
…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.
It could also have been incompetence as a form of resistance, for all we know, or a combination of both.
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.
Someone should write an update to the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
Their best and brightest were fired or retired.
Well it’s all the leftovers at this point. When the priority is loyalty, performance suffers.
Amazing what a bit of knowledge, intelligence and competency can achieve.
Inversely, it’s also amazing what a lack thereof cannot achieve, for instance, redacting publicized documents.
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.
i also support the idea to check for pdf errors using a stream decoder.
How big is N though?
64
Since there’s 78 pages, I’m guessing at least 1 ambiguity per page? Anyways, it’s dreadfully big.
2^78 is large but computers can do an awful lot per second, so if only about some the pages contain attachments 2^40-55 is something you could bruteforce in weeks if you can do millions of attempts a second
I have never looked into the details of an OCR, but if it’s a classifier it should give the it’s confidence in being a 1 or L so you can start with the low confidence characters.
Asking the real questions
Has anyone checked if it’s just black text on a black background. That would be in line with the competence level of Donnie’s administration.
I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.
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…
had their email encoded as PDF
Doesn’t compute, please explain.
I guess the same way email can have html as an attachment for the same thing a plaintext does, evidently some of these mails suggested a mailer actually pdf encoded the email and attached, as well as the plain text.
So when someone replied with plaintext the base64 encoded PDF that they were replying to got ‘quoted’, meaning the unredacted email they were replying to is in there, just messy due to font confusion in the provided format.
Or did they just initially export the emails from Outlook as pdfs for the redaction process?
Ah, makes sense, thanks.
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.
Fun fact: this guy uses fish shell.
Hell yeah, fish is great
Sounds like he also maintains it
Source? I’ve seen the bash reference manual in the files
The article author. And they state it explicitly in the footnotes.
Interesting in few weeks we might end up with some additional unredacted documents
But knowing the sick fucks in these files, possible child-related content…
I need an ELI5 version of this. (Note: this comment is a critique of me, not the author or the content of the article.)
Edit: if “nerdsnipe” isn’t in the dictionary, it totally should be.
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 encoded using base64. Base64 can always take binary input and return an ASCII output. This is trivial to reverse if you have the ASCII output.
However, the font choice is inconvenient because l and 1 look the same.
I’m a bit confused by the article is 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.
Its correct
Why the pdfs contain “wrong letters” though, i havent a clue
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.
I think this is the origin: https://xkcd.com/356/
