this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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346
Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments (neosmart.net)
submitted 7 hours ago by apftwb@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip 5 points 34 minutes ago* (last edited 24 minutes ago)

I tried to leave a comment, but it doesn't seem to be showing up there.

I'll just leave it here:

too tired to look into this, one suggestion though - since the hangup seems to be comparing an L and a 1, maybe you need to get into per-pixel measurements. This might be necessary if the effectiveness of ML or OCR models isn't at least 99.5% for a document containing thousands of ambiguous L's. Any inaccuracies from an ML or OCR model will leave you guessing 2^N candidates which becomes infeasible quickly. Maybe reverse engineering the font rendering by creating an exact replica of the source image? I trust some talented hacker will nail this in no time.

i also support the idea to check for pdf errors using a stream decoder.

[–] nomecks@lemmy.wtf 8 points 1 hour ago

We just need those 76 page base64 printouts stuffed into captcha so we can crowdsource cracking them

[–] random_character_a@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Has anyone checked if it's just black text on a black background. That would be in line with the competence level of the Donnie's administration.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 2 points 30 minutes ago

Some of the reactions are some in an effective way, and I assume this example is one of them. The problem being evidently they didn't think any what might be in big base64 blobs in the PDF, and I guess some of these folks somehow had their email encoded as PDF, which seems bonkers....

[–] Manjushri@piefed.social 33 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

...it’s safe to say that Pam Bondi’s DoJ did not put its best and brightest on this (admittedly gargantuan) undertaking

Actually they did. It's just that their best and brightest are fairly dim.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 2 points 27 minutes ago

Well it’s all the leftovers at this point. When the priority is loyalty, performance suffers.

[–] toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone 74 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

This is really great, dont tell this to anyone!

They are still releasing more parts of the Epstein files!

Take the advice of Napoleon: Never interrupt the enemy while they are making a mistake!

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 44 points 4 hours ago

yeah, I'm always a bit annoyed when people laught at the incompetence.

Let them.

Heck, some of it might even be intentional. Don't take away tools for leakers

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 13 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Fun fact: this guy uses fish shell.

[–] E_coli42@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Source? I've seen the bash reference manual in the files

[–] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 hours ago

The article author. And they state it explicitly in the footnotes.

[–] itsathursday@lemmy.world 106 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Amazing what a bit of knowledge, intelligence and competency can achieve.

[–] wuffah@lemmy.world 63 points 6 hours ago

Inversely, it’s also amazing what a lack thereof cannot achieve, for instance, redacting publicized documents.

[–] schwim@piefed.zip 46 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

I am not intelligent enough to understand any of it but that was a fun read.

TIL the origin of Courier.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 117 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

Long story short:

  • Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
  • The way attachments work in emails is that they're converted to encoded text.
  • That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
  • So it's theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.

Source: I'm a software developer and I'm currently trying to recover one of these attachments.

[–] apftwb@lemmy.world 36 points 4 hours ago

I'm a software developer and I'm currently trying to recover one of these attachments.

🫡

[–] proudblond@lemmy.world 50 points 5 hours ago

Godspeed friend

[–] apftwb@lemmy.world 13 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

Are you having as much trouble with OCR as the article author? I would have thought OCR was a solved problem in 2026 even with poor font selection.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 7 points 1 hour ago

I'm not having trouble with it as such, it's just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it's ridiculously time-consuming.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I wonder if they gave considered crowdsourcing this, having many people type in small chunks of the data by hand, doing their own character recognition? Get enough people in and enough overlap and the process would have some built-in error correction.

[–] apftwb@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean the problem is that even with human eyes it's still really hard to tell l and 1 in that font.

See image

[–] Kevlar21@piefed.social 5 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Not an expert at all but I’m genuinely curious how long it would take to check all possibilities for each I or 1? Is that the full length of the hash or whatever? So in this example image we have 2^8 =256 different possibilities to check? Seems like that would be easy enough for a computer.

Edit: actually read the article. It’s much more complicated than this. This isn’t really the only issue and the base64 in the example was 76 pages long.

[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 hours ago

There's an iOS game about the history of fonts you might enjoy. Struggling to find it at the moment, but you play a colon navigating through time, solving various puzzles.

[–] BlackLaZoR@fedia.io 25 points 6 hours ago

Interesting in few weeks we might end up with some additional unredacted documents

[–] magnetosphere@fedia.io 16 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] apftwb@lemmy.world 20 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 55 minutes ago

Its correct

Why the pdfs contain “wrong letters” though, i havent a clue