Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

neosmart.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 224 posts

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#171

Post by swsieber »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #167
wahern wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not necessarily a PDF attachment? Someone who made some progress on one Base64 attachment got some XMP metadata that suggested a photo from an iPhone. Now I don't know if that photo was itself embedded in a PDF, but perhaps getting at least the first few hundred bytes decoded (even if it had to be done manually) would hint at the file-type of the attachment. Then you could run your tests for file fidelity.

I'd say 99% of the time, the first 10 bytes would be enough to know the file type.

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#172

Post by roywiggins »

brabel wrote: post #148
subscribed wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point you're taking a piss, this is not a honest discussion stance. Judges themselves complained about their own orders being ivolated/ignored. Repeatedly.

If someone violates a court order don’t they get arrested?? Can’t the judge pronounce the perpetrators should be arrested instead of just complaining?

The problem is that it's always specific to a particular case. So, if one guy isn't being released according to court order, they could order someone held in the courthouse jail until he is, and probably just the threat will get him released. But then 1) nobody ends up in jail, because they're not in contempt anymore and 2) it doesn't do anything for any other cases, and there are so many other cases. This sort of contempt where a judge can just order it is "civil contempt" and is meant to convince someone to comply with the court order, it can't be used to punish someone longer than that (criminal contempt can, but you need an actual prosecution, trial, etc).

You might think "ok can't they be held in contempt for the pattern of ignoring court orders" and, well, you'd think so. But that looks a lot like a universal injunction or a class action and SCOTUS has deliberately been nerfing those.

If they've simply been committing crimes then judges don't have anything to do- they'd have to be prosecuted by someone, or I guess sued civilly, but that won't put them in jail either and takes forever.

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#173

Post by roywiggins »

roywiggins wrote: post #72
typeofhuman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"Allegations" from the exact judges whose orders aren't being enacted? The orders in question are pretty simple: release this guy. Don't take this guy out of state. It's pretty clear when they're not being followed. This guy is not a slouch: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/27/patrick-schiltz-jud... https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230... https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscour…

A specific case:

https://www.startribune.com/judge-orders-detainee-returned-m...

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#174

Post by masfuerte »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #23

pdftoppm and Ghostscript (invoked via Imagemagick) re-rasterize full pages to generate their output. That's why it was slow. Even worse with a Q16 build of Imagemagick. Better to extract the scanned page images directly with pdfimages or mutool. Followup: pdfimages is 13x faster than pdftoppm

This. Not only is it faster, the images are likely to be of better quality. If you rasterize the pages then the images will be scaled, unless you get very lucky.

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#175

Post by pbhjpbhj »

WolfeReader wrote: post #15
percentcer wrote: post #11

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.

You think compelling 76 people to honestly and accurately transcribe files is something that's easy and quick to accomplish.

Captcha!

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#176

Post by mschuster91 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #133
mschuster91 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more than enough credible reports of CSAM in the Epstein Files dump - more than enough for me to not go and download even a single file of them myself, simply because German law does not care about why you are in the possession of CSAM, even if you took the picture yourself. The legal situation regarding CSAM is very strict no matter which country, and I better hope no one here will actually be dumb enough to…

Use encryption > even if you took the picture yourself. I'd hope the punishment is more severe in that case!

> I'd hope the punishment is more severe in that case!

I'm talking about kids making photos of themselves. Which has been an issue multiple times in the past.

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#177

Post by mschuster91 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #164
chrisjj wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that. CSAM is evidence of abuse. Hence the "A". And nudity is not required.

CSAM has a meaning identical to child porn but doesn't make that meaning explicit. Drawn or generated depictions of child nudity can be considered CSAM in some jurisdictions.

Yep. Germany is very very strict for example. Even textual descriptions fall under that law.

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#178

Post by pbhjpbhj »

klustregrif wrote: post #112
nialv7 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like we have it. in the end it's pretty mundane...

Which begs the question why was it censored?

Mighty be they censored all pages mentioning keywords, this one says "Breast" ... perhaps they censored all sexual content?

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#179

Post by klustregrif »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #178
klustregrif wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which begs the question why was it censored?

Mighty be they censored all pages mentioning keywords, this one says "Breast" ... perhaps they censored all sexual content?

At the risk of repeating myself. Which begs the question why?

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#180

Post by estimator7292 »

WolfeReader wrote: post #15
percentcer wrote: post #11

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.

You think compelling 76 people to honestly and accurately transcribe files is something that's easy and quick to accomplish.

Friend, have you ever heard of secretaries?
Post reply on HN