This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written.
Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
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Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#12Why not just try every permutation of (1,l)? Let’s see, 76 pages, approx 69 lines per page, say there’s one instance of [1l] per line, that’s only… uh… 2^5244 possibilities… Hmm. Anyone got some spare CPU time?
It should be much easier than that. You should should be able to serially test if each edit decodes to a sane PDF structure, reducing the cost similar to how you can crack passwords when the server doesn't use a constant-time memcmp. Are PDFs typically compressed by default? If so that makes it even easier given built-in checksums. But it's just not something you can do by throwing data at existing tools. You'll need to build a testing harness with instrumentation deep in the bowels of the decoders. This kind of work is the polar opposite of what AI code generators or naive scripting can accomplish.
Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#13> …but good luck getting that to work once you get to the flate-compressed sections of the PDF.
A dynamic programming type approach might still be helpful. One version or other of the character might produce invalid flate data while the other is valid, or might give an implausible result.
Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#14If only Base64 had used a checksum.
"had used"? Base64 is still in very common use, specifically embedded within JSON and in "data URLs" on the Web.
Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#15This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written.
You think compelling 76 people to honestly and accurately transcribe files is something that's easy and quick to accomplish.
Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#16This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written.
> Just get 76 people
I consider myself fairly normal in this regard, but I don't have 76 friends to ask to do this, so I don't know how I'd go about doing this. Post an ad on craigslist? Fiverr? Seems like a lot to manage.
Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#17Honestly, this is something that should've been kept private, until each and every single one of the files is out in the open. Sure, mistakes are being made, but if you blast them onto the internet, they WILL eventually get fixed.
Cool article, however.
Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#18This one is irresistible to play with. Indeed a nerd snipe.
I doubt the PDF would be very interesting. There are enough clues in the human-readable parts: it's an invite to a benefit event in New York (filename calls it DBC12) that's scheduled on December 10, 2012, 8pm... Good old-fashioned searching could probably uncover what DBC12 was, although maybe not, it probably wasn't a public event. The recipient is also named in there...
There's potentially a lot of files attached and printed out in this fashion.
The search on the DOJ website (which we shouldn't trust), given the query: "Content-Type: application/pdf; name=", yields maybe a half dozen or so similarly printed BASE64 attachments.
There's probably lots of images as well attached in the same way (probably mostly junk). I deleted all my archived copies recently once I learned about how not-quite-redacted they were. I will leave that exercise to someone else.
Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#19> …but good luck getting that to work once you get to the flate-compressed sections of the PDF. A dynamic programming type approach might still be helpful. One version or other of the character might produce invalid flate data while the other is valid, or might give an implausible result.
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Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
#20> it’s safe to say that Pam Bondi’s DoJ did not put its best and brightest on this Or worse. She did.
I mean, the internet is finding all her mistakes for her. She is actually doing alright with this. Crowdsource everything, fix the mistakes. lol.