I love how every single comment here is litigating whether or not this qualifies “hacking” (yes I know obviously it does not) so I can’t really find any discussion on the contents lol
Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
561–570 of 810 posts
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#562It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks. Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function. Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted. Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who dis…
I think we should all come to terms with it that "hack" doesn't mean anything anymore so we don't have to fight over words that were never clearly defined anyways. On most days this site here should be called "frontendnews".
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re absolutely correct but I think your comment also highlights something important: we don’t have a good word to represent what it is Unfortunately “hack” became a catch all word long ago. Just look at “life hacks”.
Just like my friends and family call everything AI now. Special effects in movies? AI Some edited photo? AI Illustration for advertising? AI
To be fair, I put partial blame on the advertisers.
They've been claiming "AI" on their products on anything that has an algorithm basically for the past few years.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the…
I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here. It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this… You can find out the technical details in one quick search. How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age.
It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way.
They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs.
Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not enough money in what's left of that industry to do that anymore.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans. Yep. I think this sort of thing is actually their biggest concern with releasing the docs. They can redact or lose documents that say anything directly incriminating about Trump and his associates and dismiss everything Epstein and testimonies from the 2020s say about him as confabulation, but there are other people who might…
Redactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing). It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs. And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't releas…
The goal (at least it appears this way to me) is less about having any sort of airtight defense or actually successfully protecting people in the docs so much as giving plausible deniability for the talking heads that support the administration to push as truth. If it’s murky, sloppy, or otherwise unclear, then “no one wins” and “no one is right,” so the event can be easily dismissed.
You can open up any popular conservative forum/watch any mainstream conservative pundit and they are all saying the same thing: “there’s nothing here it doesn’t matter, Trump is just being photographed with women sometimes who cares?” Then some deflection about Bill Clinton, making sure to bring up the hot tub photo.
The reason it hasn’t gone away though, despite this often being a very effective approach, is because too many of them hung their hats on Epstein conspiracy theories from 2020 to 2024. It made a lot of people a lot of money and catapulted more than a handful of political careers. Now they have the means to be transparent and they can’t make an acceptable excuse not to be since they were all so loudly chest pounding about it, including the vice president himself.
I think almost all the discussions about Epstein are incredibly crass and gross. It’s not about the victims or justice, it’s about politics. I think there are obviously legitimate reasons to redact portions because we don’t want to ruin more lives (not that this was a real good faith attempt at that). But there is still a small part of me that can’t help but enjoy watching the Trump administration simmer in the pot they so clearly made for themselves over the last five years.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#566This is "fake stupidity", a decoy to make the public think it is uncovering stuff that was meant to be hidden while in reality the really damning documents have been filtered and or doctored already. You might get thrown some meaningless and practically worthless + innocent scraps and bones like Trump wrapping his arm around a young woman and that‘s it.
You think you uncovered the hidden layer but that was just a decoy.
You guys are too gullible.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly. What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or…
> strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth) If it's worth so little to your eyes/comprehension you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients... That snide remark is used to discredit a profession in passing, but the reason you won't find a lot of examples of this happening is becau…
> you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients...
There are almost 2000 disbarments annually in the US.
The california bar recieves 1 compliant for every 10 law licenses in the state every year.
There's a wikipedia page on notable disbarments.
Legal malpractice suites are on the rise.
If you are going to assert that legal malpractice is not legitimate concern, I think the burden of evidence is on you.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#568This reminds me of when some government org leaked social security numbers in client-rendered html comments (or something similar) and people who discovered this were called hackers for using browser dev tools
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me. You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article. Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case. Although I don’t completely disagree with your cynical take I don’t think that’s actually the case for most of the Guardians journalists, they do a lot of quality reporting too
The journalist should have used the LLM to explain how this wasn’t a hack but a common mistake made by untrained workers.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#570It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks. Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function. Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted. Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who dis…
It does seem to raise the risk that someone would be prosecuted for DMCA violation if we refer to it that way.