What would be more interesting: His Bank accounts.
Who paid him?
Who did get paid?
A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
101–110 of 254 posts
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#102I 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 \ -…
Shouldn't $ROTATION be set inside the loop and actually used in the magick command?
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
this is a well-studied field (stylometry). when combining writing styles, vocabulary, posting times, etc. you absolutely can narrow it down to specific people. even when people deliberately try to feign some aspects (e.g. switching writing styles for different pseudonyms), they will almost always slip up and revert to their most comfortable style over time. which is great, because if they aren't also regularly changi…
People do change over time, I used to write "ha" after every sentence for some reason
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 vocabul…
Well, humans might be great at detecting AI (few false negatives) but might falsely accuse humans more often (higher false positive rate). You might be among a set of humans being falsely accused a lot, but that's just proof that "heuristic stylometry" is consistent, it doesn't really say anything about the size of that set.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#105What 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.
> What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications? An act of congress, for one. Also, AFAIK, federal privacy generally ends at death, as does criminal liability; so releasing government files from a federal investigation after death of the subject is generally within the realm of acceptable conduct.
Yes, I forgot about that major part of the story! Still, acts of Congress can't violate Consitutional rights.
It seems unlikely you lose all rights when you die or it would be chaos - imagine all the secrets people die with that affect everyone they know. An integral part of every estate plan would be incinerating records. Wills do have real power.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always wondered how much of a cultural etc influence 4Chan actually had (has?) - so much of the mindset and vernacular that was popular there 10+ years ago is now completely mainstream.
Ah, a rare opportunity to share a blog post that had a big effect on my political outlook back in 2016, Meme Magic Is Real, You Guys Who can say what effect it had on the world, but a presidential candidate reposting himself personified as Pepe the frog was still weird back then, and at least a nod to the trolls doing so much work on his behalf https://medium.com/tryangle-magazine/meme-magic-is-real-you-... (dismissa…
Counterpoint: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0
Summary: Trump used memes not in the sense of pepes but in the original (Dawkins') sense of "earworm" soundbites, along with a torrent of scandals, each making the previous seem like old news, to exploit a public tired of the "status quo" into voting for a zany wildcard pushing for reactionary policy
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#107What 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.
Who determines who deserves privacy, and how do they determine it?
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications? An act of congress, for one. Also, AFAIK, federal privacy generally ends at death, as does criminal liability; so releasing government files from a federal investigation after death of the subject is generally within the realm of acceptable conduct.
Yes, I forgot about that major part of the story! Still, acts of Congress can't violate Consitutional rights. It seems unlikely you lose all rights when you die or it would be chaos - imagine all the secrets people die with that affect everyone they know. An integral part of every estate plan would be incinerating records. Wills do have real power.
[dead]
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If it's already scanned, then you don't have to leave your desk.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Depending on their technical capability, yes. I mean even in this thread you got what are essentially one-liners to do it. Definitely less hassle then doing it irl
Hoe big a percentage of FBI / DoJ employees are running linux (with imagemagick) as their work computer? I'd be surprised to see a similar oneliner for a stock windows installation.
Yeah they might have used some web converter, but that on the other hand would have been extremely incompetent handling of the secret data.