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A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

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Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#61

Post by thatguy0900 »

dopa42365 wrote: post #60
nubg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.

Given the "nature" of 4chan (only a few hundred posts and a few thousand comments at a time, the vast majority of it shitposts and spam), it just can't do that. The imageboard format and limits basically prevent any scaling and mainstream success. If you follow any of the general threads in pol or sp for a while, you'll spot the same few people all the time, it's a tiny community of active users.

I think the logic is Pol didn't need to reach the masses, the masses only consume content they don't create it. You only need to radicalize the few people who then go on to be the 1% of people commenting and posting.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#62

Post by mort96 »

nubg wrote: post #39
kmeisthax wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Epstein tried to meet with moot at least once: https://www.jmail.world/search?q=chris+poole

He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.

Just to substantiate this a bit: I remember a gleeful consensus in certain circles being that /pol/ and /r/the_donald had "memed Trump into the White House". It's much more complicated than that, but there's certainly an element of truth there.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#63

Post by actionfromafar »

GaryBluto wrote: post #42
nubg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.

/pol/ in no way started the American culture war. It was brewing for a while.

Well, broke the levee if you will. Otherwise, explain Pepe.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#64

Post by GaryBluto »

actionfromafar wrote: post #63
GaryBluto wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/pol/ in no way started the American culture war. It was brewing for a while.

Well, broke the levee if you will. Otherwise, explain Pepe.

I hardly think an internet image of a cartoon frog heavily influenced American elections, despite a surface-level co-option by various Republican politicians.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#65

Post by mrandish »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #43
ted_bunny wrote: post #34

Has anyone analysed JE's writing style and looked for matches in archived 4chan posts or content from similar platforms? Same with Ghislaine, there should be enough data to identify them atp right? I don't buy the MaxwellHill claims for various reasons but it doesn't mean there's nothing to find.

Stylometry is extremely sophisticated even with simple n-gram analysis. There's a demo of this that can easily pick out who you are on HN just based on a few paragraphs of your own writing, based on N-gram analysis. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way. The approaches based on training another transformer to spot "AI generated" content are wron…

> You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way.

I have no idea if specialized tools can reliably detect AI writing but, as someone whose writing on forums like HN has been accused a couple of times of being AI, I can say that humans aren't very good at it. So far, my limited experience with being falsely accused is it seems to partly just be a bias against being a decent writer with a good vocabulary who sometimes writes longer posts.

As for the reliability of specialized tools in detecting AI writing, I'm skeptical at a conceptual level because an LLM can be reinforcement trained with feedback from such a tool (RLTF instead of RLHF). While they may be somewhat reliable at the moment, it seems unlikely they'll stay that way.

Unfortunately, since there are already companies marketing 'AI detectors' to academic institutions, they won't stop marketing them as their reliability continues to get worse. Which will probably result in an increasing shit show of false accusations against students.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#66

Post by thatguy0900 »

littlecorner wrote: post #29
waynenilsen wrote: post #9

> Information leakage may also be occurring via PDF comments or orphaned objects inside compressed object streams, as I discovered above. hopefully someone is independently archiving all documents my understanding is that some are being removed

I think some of the released documents included images of victims, which where redacted. So it's not necessarily malicious removals

If we're assuming they didn't leave victims unredacted on purpose

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#67

Post by burkaman »

kipchak wrote: post #48
nubg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.

Which meeting are you seeing? That search doesn't seem to work for me, I'm only seeing the one Jan 2012.

It doesn't show up in JMail for some reason, but it's this email: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01852...

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#68

Post by shrubble »

nubg wrote: post #39
kmeisthax wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Epstein tried to meet with moot at least once: https://www.jmail.world/search?q=chris+poole

He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.

I don’t agree with this analysis.

The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.

And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#69

Post by anigbrowl »

mmooss wrote: post #44

What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications? If they can do it to Epstein, they can do it to you, to the Washington Post journalist, to former President Clinton, etc. Is the scope at least limited somehow? Generally I favor transparency, but of course probably the most important parts are withheld.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405...

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#70

Post by actionfromafar »

GaryBluto wrote: post #64
actionfromafar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, broke the levee if you will. Otherwise, explain Pepe.

I hardly think an internet image of a cartoon frog heavily influenced American elections, despite a surface-level co-option by various Republican politicians.

I agree completely.

I'm just saying, it's a symptom. The crazy found critical mass, broke containment. From there it was laundered in millions of Facebook groups and here we are.

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