forgetting to redact credentials that made it possible for all of Reddit to log into Epsteinβs account and trample over all the evidence
/o\ π€¦
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
663 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
80744 readers
3703 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
Part of me wants to think this fuck up was on purpose.
Literally stop publicizing this stuff until they've shown their entire hands
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!
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
...itβs safe to say that Pam Bondiβs 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.
It could also have been incompetence as a form of resistance, for all we know, or a combination of both.
This. If I didnβt agree with what theyβre doing (and I donβt) and I wanted to resist I would do my best to steer towards a reversible redaction method. Then just feign ignorance.
Someone should write an update to the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
Their best and brightest were fired or retired.
Well itβs all the leftovers at this point. When the priority is loyalty, performance suffers.
We just need those 76 page base64 printouts stuffed into captcha so we can crowdsource cracking them
I actually like this idea a lot (the crowdfunding part)
crowdsource, not crowdfund. One is sharing the work, the other is sharing the cost.
Is that nitpick really necessary? I would be donating my time, that's my cost. So crowdfunded wouldn't even be wrong unless you believe your time to be worthless.
It's not a nitpick for me but a relevant clarification to distinguish between two very different words.
Amazing what a bit of knowledge, intelligence and competency can achieve.
Inversely, itβs also amazing what a lack thereof cannot achieve, for instance, redacting publicized documents.
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.
How big is N though?
Since thereβs 78 pages, Iβm guessing at least 1 ambiguity per page? Anyways, itβs dreadfully big.
2^78 is large but computers can do an awful lot per second, so if only about some the pages contain attachments 2^40-55 is something you could bruteforce in weeks if you can do millions of attempts a second
64
Asking the real questions
I am not intelligent enough to understand any of it but that was a fun read.
TIL the origin of Courier.
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.
I'm a software developer and I'm currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
π«‘
Godspeed friend
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.
OCR is mostly good enough. Problem here is we have 76 pages that we need to be read perfectly, with a low fidelity input
We also have very little in the way of error correction, since it's mostly not human readable
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Has anyone checked if it's just black text on a black background. That would be in line with the competence level of Donnie's administration.
I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.
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....
had their email encoded as PDF
Doesn't compute, please explain.
I guess the same way email can have html as an attachment for the same thing a plaintext does, evidently some of these mails suggested a mailer actually pdf encoded the email and attached, as well as the plain text.
So when someone replied with plaintext the base64 encoded PDF that they were replying to got 'quoted', meaning the unredacted email they were replying to is in there, just messy due to font confusion in the provided format.
Or did they just initially export the emails from Outlook as pdfs for the redaction process?
Ah, makes sense, thanks.
Some email programs did that, especially when there was special formatting involved. I seem to recall Thunderbird doing it in the past, as well as outlook.
Fun fact: this guy uses fish shell.
Hell yeah, fish is great
Sounds like he also maintains it
load more comments
(2 replies)
Interesting in few weeks we might end up with some additional unredacted documents
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next βΊ