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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

#81

Post by kmeisthax »

shrubble wrote: post #68
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.

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”.

From moot's perspective, it can be as simple as being convinced by some rich guy you've never heard of to bring back the politics board. He doesn't need to have an intent to start a fascist coup, that's Epstein's job. GamerGate is just the point at which moot realized he'd fucked up and destroyed 4chan imageboard culture by letting /pol/ fester.

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

#82

Post by WetMinister »

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.

You’re acting as if https://doge.gov does not exist. Ask yourself under which presidency, administration and kind of politics such is allowed to even exist with a straight face.

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

#83

Post by albroland »

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.

Few thoughts: in context it's not nuts at all:

- moot was fundraising for his VC backed startup during the years the emails are in, and he was likely connected via mutuals in USV or other firms. These meetings were clearly around him trying to solicit investment in his canv.as project.

- /pol/ was /new/ being returned; the ethos of the board had already existed for a long time and the decision to undo the deletion of /new/ was entirely unsurprising for denizens at the time, and was consistent with a concerted push moot was making for more transparency in the enforcement of rules on the site and fairness towards users who followed the rules. /pol/ didn't start a culture war at this time any more than /new/ had previously - it just existed as a relatively content-unmoderated platform for people to discuss earnestly what would get them banned elsewhere.

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

#84

Post by mort96 »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #61
dopa42365 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's an old joke that 9gag* only reposts stuff from Reddit and Reddit only reposts stuff from 4chan and 4chan is the origin of all meme culture. This joke was widespread enough to reach myself and my friend group back in the day, even though none of used 4chan or Reddit.

If you radicalise the 0.01% of people who are prolific meme creators, you radicalise the masses.

* I did say old...

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

#85

Post by todfox »

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.

He was a pedophile sex trafficker. Epstein and his clients deserve zero privacy.

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

#86

Post by draw_down »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #80
anigbrowl wrote: post #71

I found this part interesting: There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easi…

Very interesting. That document in particular seems to be an interview of A. Acosta by the DoJ from 2019. But what reason would the FBI have for pretending it's a scanned document, if it is genuine? Perhaps there's some aspect of Epstein's deal with Acosta that they'd rather not reveal to the public? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%207/EFTA000092...

[dead]

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

#87

Post by juujian »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #80
anigbrowl wrote: post #71

I found this part interesting: There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easi…

Very interesting. That document in particular seems to be an interview of A. Acosta by the DoJ from 2019. But what reason would the FBI have for pretending it's a scanned document, if it is genuine? Perhaps there's some aspect of Epstein's deal with Acosta that they'd rather not reveal to the public? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%207/EFTA000092...

Not that I can speak from personal experience or anything... But somebody on an email chain may have requested a scanned version of the document to ensure there is no metadata and the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document. There might even be a webtool available somewhere to do so, I wouldn't know...

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

#88

Post by Eisenstein »

qoez wrote: post #58
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.

People always claimed this as a data leak vector but I've always been sceptical. Like just writing style and vocabulary is probably extremely shared among too many people to narrow it down much. (How people that you know could have written this reply?) The counter argument is that he had a very specific style in his mail so maybe this is a special case.

If you have a large enough set to test against and a specific person you are looking for, this is totally doable currently.

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

#89

Post by mikkupikku »

juujian wrote: post #87
streetfighter64 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. That document in particular seems to be an interview of A. Acosta by the DoJ from 2019. But what reason would the FBI have for pretending it's a scanned document, if it is genuine? Perhaps there's some aspect of Epstein's deal with Acosta that they'd rather not reveal to the public? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%207/EFTA000092...

Not that I can speak from personal experience or anything... But somebody on an email chain may have requested a scanned version of the document to ensure there is no metadata and the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document. There might even be a webtool available somewhere to do so, I wouldn't know...

> the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document

Is that remotely plausible? I can't imaging faking a scan being easier than just walking down the hall to the copier room.

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

#90

Post by tombrossman »

anigbrowl wrote: post #71

I found this part interesting: There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easi…

GNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly.

  ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5))

  for pdf in "$@";
    do magick  -density 150 $pdf \
              -linear-stretch '1.5%x2%' \
              -rotate 0.4 \
              -attenuate '0.01' \
              +noise  Multiplicative \
              -colorspace 'gray' \
              "${pdf%.*}-fakescan.${pdf##*.}"
  done
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