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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

#141

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

acessoproibido wrote: post #41
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 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.

I remember in high school finding the whole nazi thing funny. They were literal losers in ww2. It was like drawing a communist hammer and sickle.

Looking back on it, I wonder if this was priming.

I didn't fall for it. They are still losers, but the encyclopedia dramatica with swastikas looks way way way less funny in 2026 than it did in 2008.

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

#142

Post by thatguy0900 »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #134
thatguy0900 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pretty devious tactic if so. Chilling effect on both any further witnesses and anybody interested in archiving the data (gives them an ethical conundrum at least). In addition to giving them (the feds) a convenient excuse to take down random docs.

Not about a ethical conondrum when rehosting. Anyone who rehosts the whole files can be accused of hosting child porn and doxxing and taken down.

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

#143

Post by shevy-java »

So I have been wondering about this ...

Some of the gathered data is shown here, right? Probably not all.

Now ... that's static information though. That's not really an analysis, most definitely not an independent (open ended) analysis. And it will only show a very incomplete part of the full picture.

This is why I think the "release the files" movement, as good as they are, seems incomplete. I'd rather know a lot more about how they operate their networks, getting away involving underage women. How about secret services of other countries? Should that not also be highly important? So why is there not really a larger investigation as well as independent analysis? Those .pdf files alone can not tell the whole picture. That can just be the tip of the iceberg; and it evidently involves other countries too, with Prince Andrew being the most famous here (aka, the UK, but we already saw that other countries also have similar issues where people suddenly had to step away from politics when it was found out they visited the party-locations of Mr. Epstein).

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

#144

Post by culi »

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.

There was a post on here about a project in stylometry that analyzed HN users comment history. The tool helped find accounts that had an extremely similar writing style to a given account. The site was soon removed due to privacy concerns but many users with multiple account attested to its accuracy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

It turns out stylometry is actually a pretty well-developed field. It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me

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

#145

Post by durkie »

ted_bunny wrote: post #132
wholinator2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, i had a particularly cringy period in which i put "la" at the end of sentences.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. "Ooh, la" sounds really unnatural. But on a serious note, what did "la" mean in your context? I've never seen this.

It’s a common thing for speakers of Singaporean English to end sentences with la/leh. But no idea if that’s what’s going on here.

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

#146

Post by wiredpancake »

mort96 wrote: post #113
ronnier wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Reddit and almost all of social media went on to purge trump and pro trump content. The Donald was banned. Trump deplatformed across social media.

That's true, but not really relevant to this discussion. You can't really deplatform a president; yes he was no longer on Twitter, but roughly 8 billion people listen any time he speaks.

[dead]

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

#147

Post by rigrassm »

seydor wrote: post #98
corygarms wrote: post #10

These folks must really have their hands full with the 3M+ pages that were recently released. Hoping for an update once they expand this work to those new files.

why do we count this in "pages" when it's mostly an email dump

Based on my random poking around through the latest datasets for a few hours, while there are a bunch of emails, I don't know if it's "mostly" emails.

That said, in my opinion they are using "pages" as the metric because it makes the number sound huge.

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

#148

Post by pcthrowaway »

mrandish wrote: post #65
Der_Einzige wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

> I can say that humans aren't very good at it

You're assuming the people making accusations of posts being written by AI are from humans (which I agree are not good at making this determination). However, computers analyzing massive datasets are likely to be much better at it , and this can also be a Werewolf/Mafia/Killers-type situation where AI frequently accuses posters it believes are human, of being AI, to diminish the severity of accusations and blend in better.

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

#149

Post by lifestyleguru »

Beijinger wrote: post #101

What would be more interesting: His Bank accounts. Who paid him? Who did get paid?

Follow the money root cause analysis never reaches the public, although the analysis will impact the real power shift. General public will receive just enough information so that one group of people can hate another group of people.

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

#150

Post by plagiarist »

ronnier wrote: post #94
mort96 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then Reddit and almost all of social media went on to purge trump and pro trump content. The Donald was banned. Trump deplatformed across social media.

That subreddit was banned far too late. They had been urging for violence and hatred for quite some time. But action was taken only after the clowns inside of it were declaring they'd murder police officers executing a warrant (regarding legislators staying home to block quorum or whatever it was).

Of course in 2026 it is apparently fine to break into homes without a warrant and execute protesters. The same people are able to "believe" two literally opposite concepts.

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