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Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

theguardian.com

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Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#581

Post by slumberlust »

vidarh wrote: post #456
thdrtol wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I worked for a company that got a quote in the form of a Word document. Turned out it had history turned on and quotes to competitors could be recovered. There is a lot of incompitence when it comes to file formats.

For one of my first jobs I negotiated a better offer because "strings" on the document revealed the previous offer they'd sent out, and made me confident I could ask for more. Though, makes me wonder if someone has intentionally sent out offers like that with lower numbers to make people think they're outsmarting them.

Never match wits with a stringscillian!

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#582

Post by shwaj »

Rather than bemoaning the ignorance of those who can’t grasp that the text still exists under black rectangles, we should thank our lucky stars that this method of deredacting still works, well over a decade after the first time I heard of it.

May it continue to work in the decades to come!

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#583

Post by pessimizer »

BurningFrog wrote: post #564
sallveburrpi wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here. It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this… You can find out the technical details in one quick search. How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.

It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age. It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way. They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs. Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not e…

I think you have the source of the problem wrong. It's just rich kids who don't actually need the salary, and want to align to a point of view that gets them a contract to write a book, so they get invited to the right parties. They don't know anything, or care about anything.

Journalism school is "eye-wateringly" expensive:

> J-school attendees might get a benefit from their journalism degree, but it comes at an eye-watering cost. The price tag of the Columbia Journalism School, for instance, is $105,820 for a 10-month program, $147,418 for a 12-month program, or $108,464 per year for a two-year program. That’s a $216,928 graduate degree, on top of all the costs associated with gaining the undergraduate prerequisites. (Columbia, it seems important to say, is also the publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, the publication you’re now reading.)

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/do-we-need-j-schools.php

> It's people who are very good with words,

They are also not good with words.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#584

Post by rtkwe »

irjustin wrote: post #170
rtkwe wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not 'hacks' it's the people doing the redaction making beginner mistakes of not properly removing the selectable text under the redactions. They're either drawing black rectangles over the text or highlighting it black neither of which prevents the underlying text from being selected. Keeping that secret would require sponaneous silence from everyone looking at these docs which is just not possible.

Yes but don't tell them they're doing it wrong.

Impossible which is the point of the last sentence. Spontaneous secrecy when some people are discovering the bad redactions while publicly streaming is impossible.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#585

Post by morshu9001 »

userbinator wrote: post #406
PeterStuer wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also metadata in the image files. What specifically would be sensitive in the pdf with screenshots metadata that is also not present in the sceenshot image metadata?

PDF has something called an "info dictionary", which most mainstream PDF-writing software will fill out with various bits of info that you might not want known. Image files usually have substantially less metadata by default, unless it's one taken by a camera.

Screenshots specifically tend to have very little metadata

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#586

Post by figassis »

Arch-TK wrote: post #462

It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks. Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function. Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted. Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who dis…

I agree, but this would mean that almost anything can’t be called hacking, bc it usually relies on vulnerabilities and implementation defects. If something is poorly encrypted and you retrieve data, you didn’t hack because it wasn’t encrypted to begin with. That can’t be the standard.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#587

Post by andsoitis »

culi wrote: post #263
andsoitis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?

A man who tried to overturn an election is in power and is disappearing people on the streets without due process. The other day there was news about some ICE members who blew up the door to a family's home in order to detain a man. The man was a citizen. They knew that. They came to intimidate him because a few days earlier he tried filming their cars on a public street. That's just one example but these cases are o…

> disappearing people on the streets without due process.

Undocumented immigrants can be detained and deported by the U.S. government but they are still legally entitled to due process.

What is happening is aggressive enforcement and detention that can feel like “disappearing,” but it is not the same thing as extrajudicial abduction in the legal sense.

When people use the word "disappeared" they usually mean families temporarily can't find someone after detention, detainees are transferred far aways, no lawyer automatically assigned, communication is difficult, deportation happens very quickly. While this is real harm, it is not the same phenomenon as disappearance under international law.

The U.S. is aggressively detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants under civil law, sometimes with minimal process and poor transparency — but not through secret, extrajudicial disappearances. Due process is thinner than for citizens, enforcement can be opaque and traumatic, but this is not the same as "vanished" outside the legal system.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#588

Post by tsunamifury »

BurningFrog wrote: post #564
sallveburrpi wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here. It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this… You can find out the technical details in one quick search. How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.

It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age. It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way. They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs. Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not e…

Haha. I was a journalist for many years. I went to UC Berkeley. I likely currently have a far better paying job than you and have invented technical concepts that founded the LLM.

Me thinks the fool speaks of himself.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#589

Post by andsoitis »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #200
hattmall wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear he can barely do anything policy wise. Limited tariffs and immigration / border stuff is pretty much all that he is getting done.

And killing so many sailors in South American waters.

> so many

To be exact, CNN reports that for the period Sep - Dec there have been ~30 boats destroyed in ~26 attacks, with at least ~105 deaths in these operations.

The US govt is of course claiming narcotics smugglers ("narcoterrorism") while others say they are not. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween, though who knows one which end of the spectrum.

What I think is maybe more interesting is the general pressure being applied to Venezuela by the US and the EU.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#590

Post by pessimizer »

silveira wrote: post #526
kungito wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They failed to redact data. That's it. People just read the files afterwards, only formatting was wierd.

If you unlock a lock, that's still a lock. Also, in light of everything that is happening, is incredible that the top comment on this thread is about some minor semantic definitions.

There's nothing else to say about this. Also, your comment is nested even deeper within the same semantic squabbling, so it's odd that you think that it's a waste of time in light of more important things that you are also not talking about.
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