what is insane is that everyone just accepts it, knows that this happens, and dont go lynch the ones in charge immediately.
There was a time when the guy making the cannon had to sit on top of it for the first shot. Perhaps this kind of policy could be adapted to other situations aswell.
Take the job to guard epstein? take the consequences when things go wrong.
Protect criminals? take the very real consequences if found out
> what is insane is that everyone just accepts it, knows that this happens, and dont go lynch the ones in charge immediately.
For a while, my pet conspiracy theory was that this was Epstein's real cause of death: a lynching by a prison guard made to look like suicide.
I never took it too seriously, because no actual evidence; now I'm more inclined to think it was a coconspirator hoping it would mean no more evidence getting out.
interesting, Eva Dubin was highlighted today for offering Epstein her 15 year old daughter and her friends.
She's a medical doctor, who became amnesic when on the stand for Maxwell's case
>Pressed about gaps in her memory, Dubin told the court: "It's very hard for me to remember anything far back and sometimes I can't remember things from last month. My family notices it. I notice it."
Letting Claude work a little longer produced this behemoth of a script (which is supposed to be somewhat universal in correcting similar OCR'd PDFs - not yet tested on any others though):
https://pastebin.com/PsaFhSP1
Point being, "correcting" to "correct looking" may be worse than just accepting errors. Errors are often clearly identified by humans as a nonsense word. "Correcting" OCR can result in plausible, but wrong results that are more difficult for the human in the loop to identify.
That's true if we're correcting OCR of actual output text. In this case, it's operating on the base 64 text, trying to produce chunks that form valid zlib streams and PDF syntax so the file can be intact enough to be opened. "Just accepting errors" would mean not seeing any content in the file because it cannot be read.
So yes, the "fixed" output has errors, but it’s not hallucinating details like an LLM, nor is it trying to produce output that conforms to any linguistic or stylistic heuristics.
The phrase "correcting similar OCR'd PDFs" should have been "correcting similar OCR'd base 64 representations of PDFs".
> It produces a somewhat-readable PDF (first page at least) with this text output
Any chance you could share a screenshot / re-export it as a (normalized) PDF? I’m curious about what’s in there, but all of my readers refuse to open it.
It decodes to binary pdf and there are only so many valid encodings. So this is how I would solve it.
1. Get an open source pdf decoder
2. Decode bytes up to first ambiguous char
3. See if next bits are valid with an 1, if not it’s an l
4. Might need to backtrack if both 1 and l were valid
By being able to quickly try each char in the middle of the decoding process you cut out the start time. This makes it feasible to test all permutations automatically and linearly
> Then my mom wrote the following: “be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”
I'm lucky to have parents with strong values. My whole life they've given me advice, on the small stuff and the big decisions. I didn't always want to hear it when I was younger, but now in my late thirties, I'm really glad they kept sharing it. In hidhsight I can see the life-experience / wisdom in it, and how it's helped and shaped me.
This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written.
As TFA says, the hard part is that "1" and "l" look the same in the selected typeface. Whether your OCR is done by computers or humans, you still have to deal with that problem somehow. You still need to do the part sketched out e.g. by pyrolistical in [1] and implemented by dperfect in [2].
The first week of my PHD was accurately copying DNA sequences from an old paper into a computer file. 10 pages in total. I used OCR to make an initial version then text to speech to check it
Or one person types 76 pages. This is a thing people used to do, not all that infrequently. Or maybe you have one friend who will help–cool, you just cut the time in half.
Typing 76 pages is easy when it's words in a language you understand. WPM is going to be incredibly slow when you actually have to read every character. On top of that, no spaces and no spellcheck so hopefully you didn't miss a character.
Non-engineers are perfectly willing to volunteer their time to do drudgery. It's one of my opseng career's distinguishing specialties: I'll do drudgery rather than code when appropriate, rather than avoiding it or sulking about it (as was a common response at work for some number of decades!). Learned that lesson when I was 18 from an internship (where I completely failed to deliver any work product due to trying to code around the work). It's part of why I'm going into accounting: apparently having the stamina for dreary work is rare?!
Also look up double/triple data-entry systems, where you have multiple people enter the data and then flag and resolve differences. Won't protect you from your staff banding together to fuck you over with maliciously bad data, but it's incredibly effective to ensure people were Actually Working Their Blocks under healthy circumstances.
I consider myself fairly normal in this regard, but I don't have 76 friends to ask to do this, so I don't know how I'd go about doing this. Post an ad on craigslist? Fiverr? Seems like a lot to manage.
Given how much of a hot mess PDFs are in general, it seems like it would behoove the government to just develop a new, actually safe format to standardize around for government releases and make it open source.
Unlike every other PDF format that has been attempted, the federal government doesn't have to worry about adoption.
XPS [0] seems to meet these criteria. It supports most of the features of PDF, is an "official" standard, has decent software support (including lots of open source programs), and uses a standard file format (XML). But the tooling is quite a bit worse than it is for PDF, and the file format is still complex enough that redaction would probably be just as hard.
DjVu [1] would be another option. It has really good open source tooling available, but it supports substantially less features than PDF, making it not really suitable as a drop-in replacement. The format is relatively simple though, so redaction should be fairly doable.
TIFF [2] is already occasionally used for government documents, but it's arguably more complex than PDF, so probably not a good choice for this.
Even the previous justice departments struggled with PDFs. The way they handled it was scrubbing all possible metadata and uploading it as images.
For example, when the Mueller reports were released with redactions, they had no searchable text or meta data because they were worried about these exact kind of data leaks.
However, vast troves of unsearchable text is not a huge win for transparency.
PDFs are just a garbage format and even good administrations struggle.
DUBIN BREAST CENTER
SECOND ANNUAL BENEFIT
MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2012
HONORING ELISA PORT, MD, FACS
AND
THE RUTTENBERG FAMILY
HOST
CYNTHIA MCFADDEN
SPECIAL MUSICAL PERFORMANCES
CAROLINE JONES, K'NAAN,
HALEY REINHART, THALIA, EMILY WARREN
MANDARIN ORIENTAL
7:00PM COCKTAILS
LOBBY LOUNGE
8:00PM DINNER AND ENTERTAINMENT
MANDARIN BALLROOM
FESTIVE ATTIRE
pdftoppm and Ghostscript (invoked via Imagemagick) re-rasterize full pages to generate their output. That's why it was slow. Even worse with a Q16 build of Imagemagick. Better to extract the scanned page images directly with pdfimages or mutool.
This. Not only is it faster, the images are likely to be of better quality. If you rasterize the pages then the images will be scaled, unless you get very lucky.
Why not just try every permutation of (1,l)? Let’s see, 76 pages, approx 69 lines per page, say there’s one instance of [1l] per line, that’s only… uh… 2^5244 possibilities…
It should be much easier than that. You should should be able to serially test if each edit decodes to a sane PDF structure, reducing the cost similar to how you can crack passwords when the server doesn't use a constant-time memcmp. Are PDFs typically compressed by default? If so that makes it even easier given built-in checksums. But it's just not something you can do by throwing data at existing tools. You'll need to build a testing harness with instrumentation deep in the bowels of the decoders. This kind of work is the polar opposite of what AI code generators or naive scripting can accomplish.
Someone who made some progress on one Base64 attachment got some XMP metadata that suggested a photo from an iPhone. Now I don't know if that photo was itself embedded in a PDF, but perhaps getting at least the first few hundred bytes decoded (even if it had to be done manually) would hint at the file-type of the attachment. Then you could run your tests for file fidelity.
On the contrary, that kind of one-off tooling seems a great fit for AI. Just specify the desired inputs, outputs and behavior as accurately as possible.
Easy, just start a crypto currency (Epsteincoin?) based on solving these base64 scans and you'll have all the compute you could ever want just lining up
there are a few messaging conversations between FB agents early on that are kind of interesting. It would be very interesting to see them about the releases. I sometimes wonder if some was malicious compliance... ie, do a shitty job so the info get's out before it get re-redacted... we can hope...
I am in no way a republican apologist, but how many people were clamoring for the immediate releasing these documents, saying it "should be easy" and all that? Laws were passed ordering their sudden speedy disclosure. How would you have handled this?
Every second of my political consciousness in the United States has been acutely tinged with the awareness that a bunch of people, across most of the political spectrum live in a constant state of denial. Denial of personal responsibility or culpability. Denial of cognitive dissonance. Denial of any distinct, self-informed morals. Denial of anything but a fear of others. Denial of anything that makes them fearful or uncomfortable or might invite confrontation.
I've known from the second I started doing debate and FX/DX in highschool, well, let's just say I never thought that the majority of the 2FA-folks would be worth a damn when tyranny really came knocking. Fear of the other as a form of manipulation, and a distraction from class consciousness, has been their literal raison d'état since decades before I was born.
I guess I was shocked that the President being a convicted rapist and documented child predator would be a bridge too far. But then we re-elected him.
I believe it. We voted for this. We do nothing in the face of zero actual justice. This is exactly as good as we deserve. And best of all, it certainly doesn't stop here. This is what they chose to not redact. When we know they spent enormous tax-payer hundreds-of-people hours redacting the documents.
I don't think it's even conspiratorial to say they left stuff in, so they could use it as justification for not releasing the other HALF of the files that haven't been released, even overly censored.
We deserve this, and the much worse that our apathy has invited.
As a non american looking in I feel like that applies to the other side as well and is how you ended up here.
Having paid a bit of attention during the election seeing bernie and trump at least in terms of rethoric more in line with eachother on the same trade agreements, migration, etc whilst also both outperforming Hillary in the same swing states, etc is not some coincidence.
And given that you live in a 2 party state it's always going to swing at some point eventually. No matter how depraved someone like trump is.
If the next one is just as bad and they sit it out long enough they will get their turn.
I will certainly feel less confident ridiculing conspiracy theories.
I’d never believe Bill Gates would secretly slip antibiotics into his wife’s cocktail to treat an STI he got from a Russian prostitute on convicted pedophile estate.
I wish I could believe in more conspiracy theories. At least then I might believe there was some sort of master plan, that some individual or group had some image of a better world (to them) and that the world was being steered somewhere.
Unfortunately no, it just seems to be greed, incompetence, and incompetent greed. At least when a tank drives over a protestor somebody gets to be on the side of the tank. When the bus goes off a cliff because the driver sold the steering wheel everybody dies.
Schizos would be schizos anywhere else. Widely available access to information which are biased towards your own bias mostly did that. Most of the people don't understand technology in general nor the algoritmic content suggestion. That is what the real problem is.
Absolutely. It’s not some grand replacement theory. It’s not an intellectual master plan. It’s mostly plain greed and cynicism from the powerful, plus ignorance or a resigned belief that people cannot be changed from everyone else.
I’m in the second group. When a majority of people miss the basics, when a large chunk treat internet content as daily reality rather than algorithmically served rage bait, it feels like there’s nothing you can do.
A friend once told me, “I wish I were more schizo like before, it was much more fun,” and in a bleak way, I get it. I’d almost prefer it if there really were a coherent plan, some deliberate attempt by the mighty to steer civilization. But right now it mostly looks like greed and cynicism. These days, a lot of it seems to be coming out of Silicon Valley but it will change as it always does like it did before.
Epstein was involved in a UK corruption plot to reduce taxes on banker's bonuses. He was involved with insider trading around 9/11. This net is far reaching.
I wonder if this could be intentional. If the datasets are contaminated with CSAM, anybody with a copy is liable to be arrested for possession.
More likely it's just an oversight, but it could also be CYA for dragging their feet, like "you rushed us, and look at these victims you've retraumatized". There are software solutions to find nudity and they're quite effective.
The emails are bizarrely sloppy with spelling and punctuation, perhaps many usages of "don't" ended up being typed as "don t", triggering an automated find-and-replace.
The export itself is also sloppy, with characters like equal signs being added in weird places. Seems like they have it set to cast a wide and poorly set up net.
The US administration is, at present, regularly violating the law and ignoring court orders. Indeed, these very releases are patently in violation of multiple federal laws -- they're simultaneously insufficiently-responsive to meet the requirements of the law requiring the release of the files and fall afoul of CSAM laws by being incompletely redacted.
The challenge, as we're all experiencing together, is that the law is not inherently self-enforcing.
> ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence," Schiltz said, adding that he counted 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases.
"Allegations" from the exact judges whose orders aren't being enacted? The orders in question are pretty simple: release this guy. Don't take this guy out of state. It's pretty clear when they're not being followed. This guy is not a slouch:
Did you notice that one article I linked involved a DoJ lawyer admitting that she couldn't convince ICE to obey court orders that she was trying to transmit to them? That's beyond an allegation and into admission. How is that not evidence?
The problem is that it's always specific to a particular case. So, if one guy isn't being released according to court order, they could order someone held in the courthouse jail until he is, and probably just the threat will get him released. But then 1) nobody ends up in jail, because they're not in contempt anymore and 2) it doesn't do anything for any other cases, and there are so many other cases. This sort of contempt where a judge can just order it is "civil contempt" and is meant to convince someone to comply with the court order, it can't be used to punish someone longer than that (criminal contempt can, but you need an actual prosecution, trial, etc).
You might think "ok can't they be held in contempt for the pattern of ignoring court orders" and, well, you'd think so. But that looks a lot like a universal injunction or a class action and SCOTUS has deliberately been nerfing those.
If they've simply been committing crimes then judges don't have anything to do- they'd have to be prosecuted by someone, or I guess sued civilly, but that won't put them in jail either and takes forever.
Furthermore, there are numerous allegations that the documents that have been released contain CSAM, which (referencing the PDF above) may fall afoul of 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A.
In addition, one need only glance at the action in US courts to see egregious violations of the Constitution and valid court orders playing out daily.
Yes, the Abrego Garcia and Öztürk detentions are two very newsworthy cases that have actually reached the point of a final judgement in the district courts, as opposed to "merely" preliminary injunctions against the government.
(It's also worth noting that almost none of the government's appeals to their losses in preliminary injunctions have been on the merits as to whether or not their actions were legal, but rather on the grounds of "no one should be allowed to challenge our actions," which has also been a fairly losing argument for everybody except SCOTUS.)
Allegations are literally evidence. "He attacked me" is an allegation of a crime and is evidence that would be used in conjunction with other evidence to prosecute said crime.
They keep illegally appointing unqualified hacks as US attorney in defiance of the mandate they're approved by the Senate (Essayli, Habba, Halligan, Sarcone, Chattah) - judges have found at least five of the appointments illegal. As one example: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/28/judge-los-angeles-t...
They've repeatedly violated court orders to either return immigrant detainees or release them. "This is one of dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks.": https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/patrick-schiltz-judg...
His targeting and shakedowns of Universities, law firms, and media companies is transparently illegal jawboning.
Everything about the tariffs is obviously illegal which he confirms every time he opens his mouth since he's relying on 'national security' justifications to issue them without Congress and he keeps insisting they're punishment for some random perceived slight.
Some sillier things like renaming the Kennedy Center -- the law that established it literally said that it couldn't be renamed without Congress -- so Trump firing everyone on the board and then appointing a bunch of his flunkees to vote for the name change doesn't cut it.. https://beatty.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/beatty.house.gov...
It's a literal onslaught of illegality so I can't tell if you haven't read a news article since 2025 or if you're trolling.
There's more than enough credible reports of CSAM in the Epstein Files dump - more than enough for me to not go and download even a single file of them myself, simply because German law does not care about why you are in the possession of CSAM, even if you took the picture yourself.
The legal situation regarding CSAM is very strict no matter which country, and I better hope no one here will actually be dumb enough to provide actual links.
If those reports are true then what we have is not just an effective deterrent for download and distribution of the set, but legally prosecutable malware targetting anyone who does, empowered by the Interpol CSAM database to which the DOJ should probably already released the offending material.
It's a tricky issue. In many countries it's not illegal and quite common for children to run around naked in public, during the summer on beaches for example, and so millions of people have holiday photos that are technically CSAM in their possession that they don't even know they have.
CSAM has a meaning identical to child porn but doesn't make that meaning explicit. Drawn or generated depictions of child nudity can be considered CSAM in some jurisdictions.
From the unredacted attachments you could figure out what the redacted content most likely contains. Just like the other sloppy redactions that sometimes hide one party of the conversation, sometimes the other, so you can easily figure out the both sides.
Gods, I had a flashback just from you mentioning that.
I had a reasonably simple problem to solve, slightly weird font and some 10 words in English (I actually only missed one or two blocks for missing letters to cover all I needed).
After a couple of days having almost everything (?) I just surrendered. This seems to be intentionally hostile. All the docs scattered across several repositories, no comprehensive examples, etc.
Absolutely awful piece of software from this end (training the last gen).
My non political take about this gift that keeps on giving is that: PDF might seem great for the end user that is just expected to read or print the file they are given, but the technology actually sucks.
PDF is basically a prettify layer on top of the older PS that brings an all lot of baggage. The moment you start trying to do what should be simple stuff like editing lines, merging pages, change resolution of the images, it starts giving you a lot of headaches.
I used to have a few scripts around to fight some of its quirks from when I was writing my thesis and had to work daily with it. But well, it was still an improvement over Word.
It's meant as a printer replacement format, hence "print to PDF". It's a computer file format about equivalent to a printed document. Like a printed document, you can't just change its structure and recompile it.
> …but good luck getting that to work once you get to the flate-compressed sections of the PDF.
A dynamic programming type approach might still be helpful. One version or other of the character might produce invalid flate data while the other is valid, or might give an implausible result.
I doubt the PDF would be very interesting. There are enough clues in the human-readable parts: it's an invite to a benefit event in New York (filename calls it DBC12) that's scheduled on December 10, 2012, 8pm... Good old-fashioned searching could probably uncover what DBC12 was, although maybe not, it probably wasn't a public event.
There's potentially a lot of files attached and printed out in this fashion.
The search on the DOJ website (which we shouldn't trust), given the query: "Content-Type: application/pdf; name=", yields maybe a half dozen or so similarly printed BASE64 attachments.
There's probably lots of images as well attached in the same way (probably mostly junk). I deleted all my archived copies recently once I learned about how not-quite-redacted they were. I will leave that exercise to someone else.
OK, but if the solution is to brute-force them, there's probably a need to choose which files to focus on.
Of course there are other content-types, e.g. searching for "Content-Type: image/jpeg" gets hits as well. But only a few of them actually have the base64 data, mostly there are just the MIME headers.. Looking for "/9j/" (which is Base64 for FF D8 FF, which is the header for JPEG files), the Trumpian justice.gov website ignores "/" and shows results case-insensitively, but there are 4 or 5 base64'ed JPEG images in there.
I also saw that the page is vulnerable to code injection, somehow garbage in one search result preview was OCREd as "<s [lots of garbage]>", and the rest of the search results were striken-through because "<s>" is the HTML to do that.
Geezus, with the short CV in your profile, you couldn't tell an LLM to decode "filename=utf-8"CV%5F%5F%5FHanna%5FTr%C3%A4ff%5F.pdf"? That's not "Bouveng".
Anyway searching for the email sender's name, there's a screenshot of an email of hers in English offering him a girl as an assistant who is "in top physical shape" (probably not this Hanna girl). That's fucking creepy: https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/varlden/epsteins-lofte-till...
I've checked for copy and paste, there's so many character flaws, their OCR must have sucked really bad, I may try with deepseekOCR or something. I mean the database would probably more searchable if someone ran every file through a better OCR.
Honestly, this is something that should've been kept private, until each and every single one of the files is out in the open. Sure, mistakes are being made, but if you blast them onto the internet, they WILL eventually get fixed.
Won't that entire DOJ archive already be downloaded for backup by several people?
If I'd be a journalist working on those files, this is the very first thing I would do as soon as those files were published. Just to make sure you have the originals before DOJ can start adding more redactions.
Are there archives of this? I have no doubt after this post goes viral some of these files might go “missing”
Having a large number of conspiracies validated has lead me to firmly plant my aluminum hat
On one hand, the DOJ gets shit because it was taking too long to produce the documents, and then on another, they get shit because there are mistakes in the redacting because there are 3 million pages of documents.
What they are redacting is pretty questionable though. Entire pages being suspiciously redacted with no explanation (which they are supposed to provide). This is just my opinion, but I think it's pretty hard to defend them as making an honest and best effort here. Remember they all lied about and changed their story on the Epstein "files" several times now (by all I mean Bondi, Patel, Bongino, and Trump).
It's really really hard to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point.
My favorite is that sometimes they redact the word "don't". Not only does it totally change the meaning of whatever sentence it's in, the conspiracy theory is that they had a Big Dumb Regex for redacting /Don\W+T/i to remove Trump references
The zeitgeist around the files started with MAGA and their QAnon conspiracy. All the right wing podcasters were pushing a narrative that Trump was secretly working to expose and takedown a global child sex trafficking ring. Well, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that Trump was implicated too and that's when they started to do a 180. You can't have your cake and eat it too.