Just on the redaction point, I did notice one email that looked correctly redacted but when zoomed in you could see some pixels from a few letters had escaped a little. It might be possible to reverse engineer the email just from that.
A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
231–240 of 254 posts
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I look at my personal work situation, working from home would mean I can't do it immediately, but would have to remember to do it the next day. Or just do it digitally right now in a few minutes and have it off my to-do list Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to laziness, these are government workers
I think maybe the old "don't attribute to malice" adage goes out the window when we're talking about a coverup of a giant child sex trafficking ring run by high-up people in the government.
While I don't disagree with your point about Epstein case being a massive cya for a ton of people in power, the fact is that if they deeply wanted to cover up something the right way to do it would to be to actually print it and scan it, this does look like someone shortcutted some broad order to print and scan all digital media.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Fairly straightforward" is incorrect. Not an authority to describe in more detail, but the most tricky blocker I'm aware of are these proprietary "MakerNote" tags from camera manufacturers, which are (often undocumented) binary blobs. exiftool might not even know what's in there, let alone how to safely remove it without corrupting the file.
> exiftool might not even know what's in there, let alone how to safely remove it without corrupting the file. But isn't it a contiguous sequence of data whose length is determined by the container format?
On the extreme end, simply decode the image and reencode it using an encoder that you have vetted to not include any metadata.
But I agree, presumably the image data part of the file is well and exhaustively defined. I would be very interested in counterexamples that have practical consequences.
Note that there will still be concerns about stenography and fingerprinting which would warrant such a disclaimer from the creator of a tool aimed at a nontechnical audience.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless and couldn't get bothered with doing some work on it. Seems sensible...
Republicans are much more implicated then democrats. And republican part protects own pedophiles and criminals while democrats are like "sure, go after him" here. So, yes that is exactly what happened.
Of course, that's just like I said: Democrats were sitting on all those juicy details about pedophile Republicans for 5 years and decided to do nothing, even with elections at the door. Sure Jan.
You people need help. Nobody can be sane and that biased.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
The writing style is rather interesting. Epstein seems borderline dyslexic, but almost none of the emails I've seen are written in a coherent way, regardless of the sender. Either people on that level rarely write anything on their own and have completely forgotten how to construct proper sentences or maybe that just how they communicate. Sort of language internal to the group.
I haven't looked at the files, nor followed the technical analysis much, but in case you missed it, some of that incoherency may be a processing glitch discussed a couple of days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868759
Yeah, I saw that and no, that's not what I mean. Some of the conversations reads like incoherent ramblings, completely devoid of context, answers that seems unrelated. Even when we have a "full" thread of conversation, it's really hard to parse the messages and make sense of them. It sometimes read like maybe they have their own language.
Some people postes conversations, and comments, but I don't feel like they actually grasp what's being discused and they just latches on to key words.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#236Stylometry works. I've seen it used it cases where the individual was identified from a group. One thing that is telling about the Epstein case study is how long it has stayed in public view. Pizzagate, which involved more powerful people, was shut down faster than I've ever seen for anything else. I still remember and have archived the more extreme content it's sick.
I probably don’t want to see it, but what kinds of people and activities are in this Pizzagate content?
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> exiftool might not even know what's in there, let alone how to safely remove it without corrupting the file. But isn't it a contiguous sequence of data whose length is determined by the container format?
On the extreme end, simply decode the image and reencode it using an encoder that you have vetted to not include any metadata. But I agree, presumably the image data part of the file is well and exhaustively defined. I would be very interested in counterexamples that have practical consequences. Note that there will still be concerns about stenography and fingerprinting which would warrant such a disclaimer from the…
Yes, I figured that steganography, watermarks etc. are the kind of "metadata" that the tool author had in mind.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#238Earlier 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…
Another possibility is that you are actually an AI and don't know it.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
What interest would Reddit have in suppressing the backup of official, public, government document releases?
Quite a lot of individual subreddit moderators are Trump supporters. Or the site itself has a very over-broad view of what constitutes "doxing".
Perhaps a few subreddits are pro-Trump, but Reddit is well known to be very left leaning on the whole.
Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 \ -…
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you sound as grumpy as my cat looks. there's no need for this language