this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
399 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
80634 readers
6338 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I need an ELI5 version of this. (Note: this comment is a critique of me, not the author or the content of the article.)
Edit: if “nerdsnipe” isn’t in the dictionary, it totally should be.
Some of the Epstein emails were released as scanned PDFs of raw email format (See MIME)
MIME formatted emails are ASCII based. To include an attachments, which can be binary, the MIME format specifies it must be encoded using base64. Base64 can always take binary input and return an ASCII output. This is trivial to reverse if you have the ASCII output.
However, the font choice is inconvenient because l and 1 look the same.
I'm a bit confused by the article is only discussing extracting PDFs while in actuality you can reverse any attachment including images.
I am also no expert, so a smarter person will now correct me on anything I got wrong.
Its correct
Why the pdfs contain “wrong letters” though, i havent a clue
I think this is the origin: https://xkcd.com/356/
Have a 18 year old talk by a very young randall on how that problem helps him urinate