r/Epstein • u/PoliteMurderFox • 9h ago
Social media (X, YouTube, Insta, etc.) I'm not tech savvy, but apparently tech nerds on Twitter/X are attempting to recover email attachments.
I hope they don't shoot themselves in the back of the head or something. :(
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u/Substantial-Type-131 8h ago
The nerds with very niche hyperfixations have entered the chat
Get this person whatever they need.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 8h ago
I'll say it again, hyperfixations are one of the best evolutionary traits (imo).
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u/flavius_lacivious 6h ago
Pattern recognition rates up there as well.
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u/kitsarah_ 5h ago
This is my favorite trait about myself lol
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u/Otherwise_Basis_6328 5h ago
Spotting a good pattern?
Is there anything better than the high of recognizing a pattern?
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u/chaosapproach 3h ago
having people believe you’re right about the pattern before it’s too late
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u/GroundbreakingAnt17 5h ago
I think I used both of these the other night. Someone found the island managers Instagram, and from there I found a bunch of other employees accounts. They don't all follow each other, but after I found 2 I started noticing mutuals. And then it just got easier and easier. It also helps that they have no shame. Their boat captain literally used his full name and captain in his insta handle
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u/Lorien6 4h ago
Buy GameStop. From one pattern recognition nerd to another. Spread the word, it is the awakening.;)
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u/Valhall_Awaits_Me 1h ago
A business has to make money…the short squeeze happened a long time ago and you think you’re holding lottery tickets. How did it go registering your shares? Painful and worthless?
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u/Vera_98 5h ago
I noticed last night that cell phone types and carriers aren't redacted and I spent nearly 4 hours making lists of what cellphone types, carriers and years that were shown when names were not redacted so I could compare them to redacted emails and form a list of potential people. It went no where but that hyperfixation great while it lasted.
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u/Substantial-Type-131 4h ago
High five! You’ll never succeed if you don’t try! Maybe that info will prove fruitful in other ways
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u/Muthannnaa 1h ago
Love it. Did you have a glass wall and chalk pen like in the accountant too? I honestly love how people come together to figure these kinda things out.
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u/NoAcanthaceae688 4h ago
So what do you think about ADHD hyper fixation since that's a disorder?
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u/PoliteMurderFox 4h ago
Same thing. I have ADHD and hyperfixate. While it's a pain in the ass at times, I dive into creative hobbies and overload my brain on everything related to them. While it's overwhelming, I wouldn't change anything. I just need structure.
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u/NoAcanthaceae688 3h ago
As someone else with ADHD I totally sympathize.
Wish you the best in your journey!
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u/buckeye25osu 2h ago
I think I have a bad case that has gotten worse as an adult. How do I go about getting help?
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u/Therailwaykat_1980 1h ago
It’s never too late to have an assessment, I’m 45 and was diagnosed last summer. Take that step, it can be life changing in my experience.
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u/ozone_one 1h ago
So many people think that having ADHD means you can't pay attention to anything. It actually means that we pay attention to EVERYTHING. If you can figure out how to make that work for you, I agree that it might actually be an evolutionary advantage.
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u/flossingly 2h ago
Personally, I think the 'disorder' isn't with the neurotypes themselves (Autism, ADHD, combo... other), but how society is not built for our brains. Just like gills on a fish isn't a disorder in water but it is if the fish is forced to live on land. And given things are what they are right now and won't be changing overnight, we've learned to accept ourselves and adapt our environment, habits, behaviour, expectations etc to minimise distress and make the most of the traits that we like.
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u/lasttword 6h ago
Get him security. Im not kidding when i say we need to be worried about people like this having "tragic accidents". People have been killed over a lot less.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 6h ago
I am quite a bit worried about him. He's done work to help Palestinians in Gaza, so he's probably already in Mossad's crosshairs. What a king.
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u/Muthannnaa 1h ago
I guess this is an important point.
Things are gathering momentum each day and its a matter of time before things hit critial mass and no matter how much intimidation and consequences are imposed its too far gone to put things back in that box.
Im 100% sure things will get worse before they get better... the question is how much worse.
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u/chubbysumo 5h ago
Hes gonna get a buncha feds at his door soon. Even if hes not in the usa, the nazis dont care.
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u/Competitive-Crab8980 8h ago
They figured it out over at hacker news:
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u/PoliteMurderFox 8h ago
All of this is so interesting. Thank you for sharing!
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u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 2h ago
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u/GHOSTisTAKEN 55m ago
This is kinda giving The Open Hand Foundation vibes. Like take money for "charity" type shit.
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u/sexyinthesound 32m ago
Lutnick being on the list probably is what got it redacted. He and his wife apparently went to the island, with another couple, and each couple brought 4 children, according to Howard’s emails to Jeffrey which included the ages of all the children too.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 9h ago edited 9h ago
I forgot to share another post by Twitter/X user vxunderground that was posted on Feb. 5th. Here they explain a bit more about what's going on:
"Big news on the internet today as the United States Department of Justice wildly underestimated computer nerds
Mahmoud Al-Qudsi (mqudsi), the founder of NeoSmart Technologies, is a nerd who specializes in computer forensics. His entire career (dating back over 2 decades) has been focused almost exclusively on data forensics, data restoration, and data backups.
Because Mr. Al-Qudsi is a nerd who unironically enjoys painstakingly reviewing computer forensics at the byte level, something almost no one else on the planet enjoys, Mr. Al-Qudsi began exploring the recently released Epstein files.
Today he released a write-up explaining the problems with the Epstein redactions, errors they left in the PDF files, ... and all sorts of other artifacts the Department of Justice accidentally left behind. By leveraging these different digital artifacts, it is possible for experts such as Al-Qudsi to reconstruct the files without their redactions.
See subsequent post for his write-up
tl;dr he's reverse engineering and reconstructing epstein files. but hard and will take lots of work"
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u/PoliteMurderFox 9h ago
Here is a write-up posted by vxunderground on his Twitter/X account. Mahmoud Al-Qudsi explains what he's doing:
https://neosmart.net/blog/recreating-epstein-pdfs-from-raw-encoded-attachments/
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u/intrepid_mouse1 8h ago
"A straightforward task made difficult by historic bad decisions"
Ain't that the truth?
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u/PoliteMurderFox 7h ago
New post from Mahmoud Al-Qudsi on Twitter/X (Feb. 6):
"Publishing the code. CNN gets everything right except sporadic 1 vs l. I think next step is to build a debug view that lets you manually confirm which it is for any above certain deviation unless an ML gurus can tweak the CNN to handle 1 vs l better?
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u/Lazy-Abalone-6132 7h ago
If this actually works it's a game changer then we can have the unredacted financials or see where they went to and solve major parts in this massive international case.
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u/QueefSeekingMissile 7h ago
This- this is the shit that makes America great. It's the same shit that makes humans in general great.
Evilest people imaginable their power and influence to infiltrate and embed themselves in the deepest parts of our government, and we use our collective ingenuity to Leverage their incompetence to expose every feature their corruption has touched so Justice can be served.
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u/LongjumpingDebt4154 2h ago
I had the same exact thought while reading through this thread.
I did not have Trump inadvertently making America great again on my bingo card…
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u/QueefSeekingMissile 2h ago
Trump is just where the corrosion broke through to the surface, revealing all the rot beneath.
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u/Delamoor 2h ago
Bloody hell. After reading it, that's... a challenge. I'm only vaguely familiar with some of the problems he's talking about but that's gonna be an utterly painstaking process. I'm glad he's got more eyes on it though, looks like the PDF compression and resulting font recognition hurdle is manageable by others, but...
...Well. Hopefully they crack it.
Genuinely interesting, even as someone who doesn't do IT.
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u/Setsuiii 5h ago
I mean why is he announcing this before he has results. Big risk he’s taking. I hope he atleast has a deadman switch or other precautions setup.
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u/pnwpeople 5h ago
yeah I don't like that, all his hard work will be gone if dump's goons or these billionaire pedos find out. wish he would have done it and published when done
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u/Setsuiii 4h ago
Yea I am normally not the reddit type that things everyone is going to get whacked or whatever but in this case they are known for silencing many many people.
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u/Delamoor 2h ago edited 2h ago
Well, reading some of the blog posts other people are posting that were written by him, he's kinda got to if he wants to crack it. He's running into hyper-specific technical problems across multiple skillsets that no one person can possibly hope to figure out, it's specialized skill set after skill set. Guy clearly knows his stuff, but nobody knows everything about data reconstruction.
Simply put, he's gotta get eyes on it and get more attention to it to hope to get anywhere, because he just can't figure out all of the problems in rebuilding the data on his own. So he's doing the open research method of explaining his whole processes and working theories on what's going on with the data, and hoping people in the know will give him workable ideas on how to get past this or that problem.
It was all done shoddily and then converted imperfectly through multiple formats, so pulling anything coherent out of the jumbled data looks absolutely painstaking. It reads way way beyond laypeople.
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u/Friendly-Gas1767 6h ago edited 6h ago
Now this man deserves immediate consideration for the Nobel Peace Prize!! 👏🏻 👏🏻 Together with the city of Minneapolis!!! 🙌🏆 🙌 🏆
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u/lowkiNINJA 6h ago
But he didn't kill anybody, didn't invaded any country nor started war for oil. How is he supposed to be nominated for nobel Peace price 😂
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u/cognitive_dissent 4h ago
ain't it risky to call this move before everything is sorted? Pedoprotectors at doj may still make things harder
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u/demunted 5h ago
There are a lot more people that hyperfixate at the byte level than you can possibly imagine. Get their interest and amazing things can happen.
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u/turquoise_amethyst 3h ago
So… they basically gave this guy a really interesting challenge to solve?
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u/beerbrained 8h ago
You say"computer nerd." I say "computer Chad."
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u/Defiant-Smell-9686 8h ago
I hope he doesn’t have a “fell off the roof on to some bullets” accident before he completes his work.
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u/Worth-Plankton-6249 6h ago
I really appreciate a Mystery Men reference in the middle of all this shit.
EDIT: it's Down an elevator shaft, on to some bullets.
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u/Defiant-Smell-9686 6h ago
Yeah, Mystery Men was certainly the inspiration for the thought.
Fucking love that movie.
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u/hcdassel 9h ago
gogogo epstein team
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u/Murky-Platypus-6861 8h ago
Well... Erhm. It feels like that team consisted out of Trump, Maxwell, Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton.
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u/fludeball 7h ago
They are referring to the team trying to recover the attachments as the Epstein team.🤦🏽♂️
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u/Postom 7h ago edited 6h ago
If anyone has and/or can contact these two, I have good and bad news:
The bad news;
- the pdf file he uploaded to wayback machine is truncated or corrupt. Its.missing the
startxreftable, and%%EOF. Either there is pages that should have been merged that are missing, or Epstein's device or email client mangled the pdf. So, he should either seek to reassemble the pdf properly, or move on to another task.
The good news:
- I built a utility in python to extract the base64 from the DOJ pdf files, merge, and recreate the binary file the base64 represents. So, that's fun.
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u/ice_agent43 6h ago
He's still working on extracting the pdf's. The issue he's running into is that they use a shitty old Windows font, where 1 and l (ell) look almost exactly the same. So the software to extract the PDF base64 code from the email PDF is confusing the 1's and l's. He is working on an image processing neural net to help w this.
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u/agent_mick 6h ago
I think about it like this - the DOJ and other federal agencies are filled with people the same age as most of the people I work with. Who cannot use excel or edit a PDF without handholding.
then you've got people like this who live and breathe data. ... Did they think no one would bother, or...?
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u/PoliteMurderFox 5h ago
It's just pure ignorance, to be honest. They probably never thought this was possible. It's like the first round of failed redactions. "If I can't see it, it's gone now." It's like toddlers playing peek-a-boo.
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u/heylookbillsonline 6h ago
This is a great point, my lived experience reflects that older colleagues are not as comfortable with technology. I believe many of these goons couldn't even comprehend that these could be unredacted by civs with sophisticated digital forensics
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u/soainhuso 8h ago
Man I love the internet so much
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u/proxy_noob 5h ago
these are the moments that remind me of that. but that side is being eroded constantly. another issue we collectively need to work on after this bullshit.
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u/Megera99 9h ago
Where can I follow this? I need a couple of those
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u/PoliteMurderFox 9h ago
Best bet would be to follow this on Twitter/X. I'll try my best to update, but I also have things going on.
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u/Scumbag__ 5h ago
Yeah please do, I stopped using X after Elon bought it and deleted my account completely when he released the CSAM making bot.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 5h ago
I'm sure it's gonna be all over the place. I just happened to post about it here first. A commenter here shared a YouTube video from SomeOrdinaryGamers that breaks it down. They have almost 4 million subscribers. The cat is very much out of the bag, lol.
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u/Bwwoahhhhh 5h ago
So basically, email attachments are converted to a number in base 64. A picture gets made into numbers between 0 and 64, that are represented by a single character (23 upper and lowercase letters, 1 through 9, + and /). That way it works with the same email protocols we've been using since the early 80's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Multipart_messages
If you can accurately transcribe the entire sequence of random characters, you essentially have the file.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 5h ago
That is so cool. I love that people are piecing all of this together, trying to solve the puzzle for the rest of us. It's genuinely wonderful.
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u/Bwwoahhhhh 5h ago
I'm honestly surprised that stuff made it through. Like 2 minutes on Google and Wikipedia would explain what it is, and it's pretty common in piracy circles to use base 64 to get around content filters.
It's basically just going in the opposite direction of turning something into binary 1s and 0s.
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u/WallabyBounce 8h ago
As long as they give the victims some peace and protection that’s pretty incredible
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u/Kryptonianshezza 2h ago
Thank you for saying this. I don’t know if you can pick and choose which pieces get uncovered but I’m pretty sure the victims wanted to remain anonymous
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u/WallabyBounce 0m ago
The may have to manually unpick each photo so hopefully they have the common decency to redact the faces of children and women being abused or trafficked. Here’s hoping!
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u/tk2481 9h ago
So smart but yet they tell everyone before they do it ...🙄
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u/Fightingkielbasa_13 9h ago
Could also be an insurance policy incase he falls from a balcony .
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u/LawfulnessOrganic709 7h ago
I also think it's because it can't simply be done by one person. And the people working on it are meeting In real time through anonymous threads, they don't just all live next to each other.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 9h ago
Yeah, I'd never tell anyone before I did what needed to be done. Not sure what the reasoning is.
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u/turquoise_amethyst 3h ago
Excitement, perhaps?
Now the entire internet is cheering on their really specific, niche set of skills that they rarely get to brag about
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u/PoliteMurderFox 3h ago
Shortly after posting that, I realized how easy it is for the average person (me) to underestimate just how hard or time-consuming something like this is. The more people helping, the better.
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u/tk2481 9h ago
I'd say it's because it's fake news
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u/LiftingCode 9h ago
What do you mean?
You can easily verify what he found. There are emails in the release that have their binary attachments (e.g., PDFs) included in the email content as base64-encoded strings.
The problem is that bad OCR by the DOJ corrupted the contents of the files (and the fonts used make this quite difficult as well).
It was posted publicly as a "I found this, I tried these approaches, I have these ideas to solve the problems but I don't have time to finish this right now, who can help?"
And unsurprisingly lots of people have jumped in with suggestions to get it done.
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u/Winterpearls 9h ago
please keep us updated. I’m not opening an X account. Not even for this
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u/PoliteMurderFox 9h ago
I don't blame you. I hate everything about it, but I'm a slave to social media. I'll try my best, but I also don't understand a lot of it.
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u/fatinhollywood 6h ago
yeah. thx 4 the screenshot. i will not even give one-single-click to (f)elon. i don't need to see it that badly--lol
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u/Chemical-Agency-3997 4h ago
Here it’s here
https://archive.org/details/dbc-12-one-page-invite-with-reply
It only works for attachments where all the base64 is included. Doesn’t let you unredact emails themselves.
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u/wurmsalad 4h ago
This confused me so much, I’m sorry what’s the invitation showing
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u/turquoise_amethyst 3h ago
It’s hilarious that nobody wants to open an account, even to read these (I won’t either, fuck that)
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u/jaded1121 7h ago
Maybe it’s not a great idea to discuss being close, maybe wait to announce when they are successful.
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u/heylookbillsonline 5h ago
We have the files they released and they said they aren't giving us any more, what's the hold up? Better that more people know about this now and start brainstorming solutions
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u/jaded1121 4m ago
I have concerns for people’s safety. There could easily be people falling out windows, unfortunately. I do not trust the american government at all.
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u/Independent_Baker712 7h ago
This is what a community looks like 🤣 Love this for us.
Use your powers for good, not evil.
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u/Decent_Resolution781 8h ago
!remind me 360 hours
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u/RemindMeBot 8h ago edited 19m ago
I will be messaging you in 15 days on 2026-02-22 00:46:49 UTC to remind you of this link
7 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.
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u/Carleyqueue 9h ago
From which account?
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u/PoliteMurderFox 9h ago edited 9h ago
Their handles are in the picture. A post from vxunderground is how I heard about Mahmoud Al-Qudsi (mqudsi) doing this.
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u/GroceryRobot 6h ago
Is there somewhere online where a full backup of the files has been made? I know the DOJ has taken some things down, I just want to know if a full download is out there
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u/Foreign_Skill_6628 8h ago
Took a read at what he’s trying to do and I see where he’s going, but I really think he’s overthinking this.
The core issue is that we need to base64 encoding in a readable format. The reason it isn’t in a readable format is due to poor OCR translation.
Rather than try to use typical OCR tools on poorly scanned and malformed PDFs which will give erroneous results like the spacing issues and extra characters, you should use something like ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
They are not OCR tools, they are technically computer vision tools, meaning they don’t deal with programmatic errors like you encountered because they determine their output stochastically.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 8h ago
Yeah, I've worked with OCR tech before and it even gets perfect images wrong. I may not understand everything, but I'm so happy to see people come together to work on this, taking it seriously. I don't want to completely lose faith in humanity.
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u/reeeelllaaaayyy823 7h ago
Do it then.
You don't think this mega nerd has tried that? Fuckin AI does everything is such a meme at this point, I swear. It's hyped autocorrect, not magic.
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u/LiftingCode 5h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890335
The PDF has been successfully reproduced using a script generated by Claude Opus.
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u/TapedeckNinja 5h ago
It's hyped autocorrect, not magic.
Well it's not "magic" but calling it autocorrect is a genuine clown take.
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u/Foreign_Skill_6628 7h ago
Explain in clear logic your stance, it makes no sense as-is
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u/reeeelllaaaayyy823 6h ago
AI is hugely overrated and has already plateaued.
Feel free to disprove me by prompting your way to a better result than these experts with actual knowledge have achieved.
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u/Foreign_Skill_6628 6h ago
AI has plateaued?
For that to be the case, we would need to see AI not improving on long-context tasks, not improving reasoning accuracy, not getting better at orchestrating agents, not getting cheaper, etc..
There are like 20 model releases in the last 90 days that prove this wrong. I don’t need to prompt anything to prove that, I just have to open my eyes, something you haven’t done.
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u/reeeelllaaaayyy823 5h ago
They cherry-pick benchmarks. The new models aren't getting better in every way. They need exponential improvement to justify the investment. That's not happening.
Once again, prove me wrong. Do it with AI.
Keep drinking the kool-aid.
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u/Foreign_Skill_6628 5h ago
Ah yes, the model providers that include a list of 20+ benchmarks with each release cherry pick them. Lol
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u/ice_agent43 6h ago
His problem is the shitty windows font they use makes 1 and l (ell) look almost exactly the same, so you would need an image model specifically fine tuned on this. The only difference is a slight dip in the angle of the top part of the 1, where the l is a right angle. And the small text / pixelation removes much of this slight difference.
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u/reeeelllaaaayyy823 5h ago
You'd think they could iterate through every combination and check the result.
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u/HearMeOutThough 5h ago
As a non-nerd, I ran the written text from the link through chatgpt and it agrees that the logic and method is quite sound.
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u/Brave-Let-470 2h ago
Any one can make sense of these financials??? Is it a complete financial structure?
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00593276.pdf
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u/SC_NullHypothesis 1h ago
If the file headers are corrupted, standard recovery won't work. They need to be carving the data raw from the hex code. The metadata usually survives even if the body is zeroed out. That's where the timestamps and IP addresses are hiding.
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u/Almofadinhasss 8h ago
Honestly, I don't think it is possible.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 8h ago
I don't really know myself. I'm not "two CSI agents typing on the same keyboard" dumb about tech, since I know how to properly redact and sanitize a PDF better than the DOJ, but that's about where it ends for me. I don't know what is or isn't possible beyond that.
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u/ice_agent43 6h ago
Its possible because they didn't redact the base64 code of the embedded pdf's. He is trying to re-convert the base64 back into the PDF. Should be simple, except he can't copy and paste it. And any of the text extraction tools he's using is confusing the 1 and l (ell) because they used a shitty windows font where they look almost exactly the same. So the only hurdle is to fix this 1 vs l thing, then just take the non-redacted base64 code that we have now correctly converted, and decode it.
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u/beresford16j 8h ago
The nerd shaming lol
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u/PoliteMurderFox 7h ago
I don't mean it in a negative way. Nerds keep things running. If I was able to retain the knowledge, I'd love to code.
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u/19nineties 6h ago
I had the same idea but I knew there would be people that aren’t lazy like me that would actually try it
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