There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easily be measured, such as with VOL00007\IMAGES\0001\EFTA00009229.pdf. It is highly likely these PDFs were created by rendering original content (from a digital document) to an image (e.g., via print to image or save to image functionality) and then applying image processing such as skew, downscaling, and color reduction.
GNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly.
ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5))
for pdf in "$@";
do magick -density 150 $pdf \
-linear-stretch '1.5%x2%' \
-rotate 0.4 \
-attenuate '0.01' \
+noise Multiplicative \
-colorspace 'gray' \
"${pdf%.*}-fakescan.${pdf##*.}"
done
That seq is probably supposed to be $(seq 0.05 0.05 0.5). Right now it's always 0.05.
Note that you can get random numbers straight from bash with $RANDOM. It's 15 bit (0 to 32767) but good enough here; this would get between 0.05 and 0.5: $(printf "0.%.4d\n" $((500 + RANDOM % 4501)))
You know, now that you point it out that seems obvious. I think maybe I was experimenting with rotation and left that in, unused. I did this years ago. The loop works OK though. Thanks for the feedback (and now I have to finish editing that script ...)
Another explanation is that it's simply one form of lazy ineffective obfuscation performed by inexperienced relative luddites in an attempt to walk the fine line between complying with the supreme court directive & not releasing anything useful.
Other investigations into the files have found oddities like redaction of the word "don't" indicating a haphazard find-&-replace approach to redaction, possibly LLM-aided.
The DOJ/Akamai online hosted search feature is also incomplete - potentially due to some of these "digitally scanned" files not being subject to OCR.
> to pass off fraudulent or AI generated images as real.
Possibly but I don't find it compelling, if only because a significant portion of the media reportage on the files has made claims that are entirely baseless - if there were a narrative to be sold one would expect such reportage to be actively leveraging such fraudulent images.
Very interesting. That document in particular seems to be an interview of A. Acosta by the DoJ from 2019. But what reason would the FBI have for pretending it's a scanned document, if it is genuine? Perhaps there's some aspect of Epstein's deal with Acosta that they'd rather not reveal to the public?
Not that I can speak from personal experience or anything... But somebody on an email chain may have requested a scanned version of the document to ensure there is no metadata and the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document. There might even be a webtool available somewhere to do so, I wouldn't know...
If I look at my personal work situation, working from home would mean I can't do it immediately, but would have to remember to do it the next day. Or just do it digitally right now in a few minutes and have it off my to-do list
Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to laziness, these are government workers
I think maybe the old "don't attribute to malice" adage goes out the window when we're talking about a coverup of a giant child sex trafficking ring run by high-up people in the government.
While I don't disagree with your point about Epstein case being a massive cya for a ton of people in power, the fact is that if they deeply wanted to cover up something the right way to do it would to be to actually print it and scan it, this does look like someone shortcutted some broad order to print and scan all digital media.
Nice. But 5 years seems unrealistic. Who stays on the same job using same processes 5 years these days? Even if the task might remain the same, input formats might change, requiring extra maintenance to the tool. Should recalculate that for 3 years before using it in my automation decisions.
Hoe big a percentage of FBI / DoJ employees are running linux (with imagemagick) as their work computer? I'd be surprised to see a similar oneliner for a stock windows installation.
Yeah they might have used some web converter, but that on the other hand would have been extremely incompetent handling of the secret data.
Installing MSYS2 is a matter of a few minutes. There is also WSL and macOS features a POSIX shell, imagemagick is likely already installed as a dependency somewhere, like ffmpeg often also is.
I know I'm not the brightest bulb by any measure, but do some people really take less than at least a few minutes to come up with one-liners for problems as novel as graphical transformations to PDFs? Maybe if the presumed techie hacker / federal worker took it as an amusing challenge I could see this being done, but genuinely out of pure laziness? That's incredible if true.
It's not a novel problem. But yes, I don't think people quite appreciate how quick and easy it is for people who are in the habit of brewing up one-liners to solve simple problems to do that. I've done it here on HN for jq toy problems before, and I don't really doubt there are people similarly familiar with imagemagick.
It’s a mix of “they’ve done it many times before” and these days AI. But remember the “they’ve done it many times before” just means that in a technical and popular forum you’re likely to find the handful of people who have done so regularly enough to remember the one liner. Also this is probably easily searchable as well so even prior to AI not super hard.
But at that point why bother with the fakery? Why does it matter if it's obviously of digital origin? As long as it's rendered down to an image problem solved.
Was the motivation for this benign (an employee skirting regulations) or malicious?
4 reems (4×500) is hardly a lot for commercial equipment to handle - paper trays will take a reem at a time. Document analysis would still show some shenanigans were in play, but you'd get a bit of variation at least.
An easier trick I've used is just sign directly on the computer screen over the displayed document with a whiteboard marker and take a photo with my phone.
Has anyone analysed JE's writing style and looked for matches in archived 4chan posts or content from similar platforms? Same with Ghislaine, there should be enough data to identify them atp right? I don't buy the MaxwellHill claims for various reasons but it doesn't mean there's nothing to find.
There was a post on here about a project in stylometry that analyzed HN users comment history. The tool helped find accounts that had an extremely similar writing style to a given account. The site was soon removed due to privacy concerns but many users with multiple account attested to its accuracy
It turns out stylometry is actually a pretty well-developed field. It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me
>It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me
The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?
The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?
If you want to be grouped with foreigners who don't know English, it might work well, although word choices may still be distinctive enough to differentiate even when translated.
Assuming the source language is English, going to a romance language and back wouldn't be too hard grammar wise, but could easily wipe out a lot of non-Latin-descended words if you use the right approach to translation.
On the one side it's a shame this tool was removed because it's very interesting, but on the other hand, the main use case would likely abuse and (cyber)stalking.
That said, best to assume that the various government agencies have tools like this, and better - if you're trying to hide your identity online, don't just change users or go through VPNS/proxies/TOR but change your writing style too.
(Also I'm convinced most VPNs/ proxies / TOR nodes / public access points are honeypots)
Stylometry is extremely sophisticated even with simple n-gram analysis. There's a demo of this that can easily pick out who you are on HN just based on a few paragraphs of your own writing, based on N-gram analysis.
You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way. The approaches based on training another transformer to spot "AI generated" content are wrong.
> You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way.
I have no idea if specialized tools can reliably detect AI writing but, as someone whose writing on forums like HN has been accused a couple of times of being AI, I can say that humans aren't very good at it. So far, my limited experience with being falsely accused is it seems to partly just be a bias against being a decent writer with a good vocabulary who sometimes writes longer posts.
As for the reliability of specialized tools in detecting AI writing, I'm skeptical at a conceptual level because an LLM can be reinforcement trained with feedback from such a tool (RLTF instead of RLHF). While they may be somewhat reliable at the moment, it seems unlikely they'll stay that way.
Unfortunately, since there are already companies marketing 'AI detectors' to academic institutions, they won't stop marketing them as their reliability continues to get worse. Which will probably result in an increasing shit show of false accusations against students.
You're assuming the people making accusations of posts being written by AI are from humans (which I agree are not good at making this determination). However, computers analyzing massive datasets are likely to be much better at it , and this can also be a Werewolf/Mafia/Killers-type situation where AI frequently accuses posters it believes are human, of being AI, to diminish the severity of accusations and blend in better.
Well, humans might be great at detecting AI (few false negatives) but might falsely accuse humans more often (higher false positive rate). You might be among a set of humans being falsely accused a lot, but that's just proof that "heuristic stylometry" is consistent, it doesn't really say anything about the size of that set.
Thing is, people are on the lookout for obvious AI and I'm sure they have been successful a few times. But this is like confirmation bias, they will never know whether they saw / read something AI generated if they didn't clock it in the first place.
I'm on Reddit too much and a few times there were memes or whatever that were later on pointed out to be AI. And that's the ones that had tells, more and more (and as price goes down / effort/expenditure increases) it will become harder to impossible to tell.
And I have mixed feelings. I don't mind so much for memes, there's little difference between low-effort image editing and low-effort image generation IMO. There's the "advice" / "story" posts which for a long time now have been more of a creative writing effort than true stories, it's a race to the bottom already and AI will only try and accellerate it. But sometimes it's entertaining.
But "fake news" is the dangerous one, and I'm disappointed that combating this seemed to be a passing fad now that the big tech companies and their leaders / shareholders have bent the knee to regimes that are very interested in spreading disinformation/propaganda to push their agenda under people's skins subtly. I'm surprised it's not more egregious tbh, but maybe it's because my internet bubbles are aligned with my own opinions/morals/etc at the moment.
Hacker News is one of the best places for this, because people write relatively long posts and generally try to have novel ideas. On 4chan, most posts are very short memey quips, so everybody's style is closer to each others than it is to their normal writing style.
Funnily this also implies that laundering your writing through an AI is a good way to defeat stylometry. You add in a strong enough signal, and hopefully smooth out the rest.
People always claimed this as a data leak vector but I've always been sceptical. Like just writing style and vocabulary is probably extremely shared among too many people to narrow it down much. (How people that you know could have written this reply?) The counter argument is that he had a very specific style in his mail so maybe this is a special case.
Not just a test set, but enough of a set to search through and compare against. Several pages of in-depth writing isn't anywhere near sufficient, even when limiting the search space to ~10k people.
this is a well-studied field (stylometry). when combining writing styles, vocabulary, posting times, etc. you absolutely can narrow it down to specific people.
even when people deliberately try to feign some aspects (e.g. switching writing styles for different pseudonyms), they will almost always slip up and revert to their most comfortable style over time. which is great, because if they aren't also regularly changing pseudonyms (which are also subject to limited stylometry, so pseudonym creation should be somewhat randomized in name, location, etc.), you only need to catch them slipping once to get the whole history of that pseudonym (and potentially others, once that one is confirmed).
Stylometry is okay if you're trying to deanonymize a large enough sample text. A reddit account would be doable. But individual 4chan posts? You barely have enough content within the text limit.
In one use case, it is kind of a verbal exclamation point, but it has more meanings and uses than just that. Likely originates from Hokkien, but it has evolved into it is own thing. If you are curious, more details here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish
sure, not denying that. my writing style is fairly different now in my 40s than it was in my late teens/early twenties.
but, those changes are usually pretty gradual and relatively small. thats why when attempting to identify someone via writing, you look at several aspects of the writing and not just word choice (grammar, use of specific slang, sentence length, paragraph structure, punctuation, etc.). it is highly unlikely that all aspects of someones writing changes at the same time. simply removing "ha" is inconsequential to identification if not much else changed.
additionally, this data is typically combined with other data/patterns (posting times, username (themes, length, etc.), writing that displays certain types of expertise, and more) to increase the confidence level of correct identification.
The writing style is rather interesting. Epstein seems borderline dyslexic, but almost none of the emails I've seen are written in a coherent way, regardless of the sender.
Either people on that level rarely write anything on their own and have completely forgotten how to construct proper sentences or maybe that just how they communicate. Sort of language internal to the group.
I haven't looked at the files, nor followed the technical analysis much, but in case you missed it, some of that incoherency may be a processing glitch discussed a couple of days ago.
Yeah, I saw that and no, that's not what I mean. Some of the conversations reads like incoherent ramblings, completely devoid of context, answers that seems unrelated. Even when we have a "full" thread of conversation, it's really hard to parse the messages and make sense of them. It sometimes read like maybe they have their own language.
Some people postes conversations, and comments, but I don't feel like they actually grasp what's being discused and they just latches on to key words.
I was there for the original thread making the connection so I got a very fresh look at the profile. The user was consistently referring to being in dental school. A lot of posting, and not in ways that would influence opinions. Maybe a cover for more secretive mod actions, but it'd be a wastefully excessive cover.
Other mods knew them personally and were still in contact. The user claims they heard of the rumor and decided not to reactivate for the lulz.
I am not familiar with the mod side of reddit - couldn't fellow mods audit her mod action logs to find more juicy details we would have heard about by now?
If Maxwell is indeed a spy and doing what she is claimed to do, it is highly unlikely that she'd put her last name and a reference to her specific family's property in her username. This would be a glaringly arrogant choice for someone who had been groomed from an early age for spycraft, and who had any degree of oversight.
If she were part of a spy network, they would be highly remiss not to commandeer the account at the time of her arrest to avoid suspicion unless they were completely incompetent.
I am mostly familiar with cold war espionage so it just doesn't sound like the general MO to me. Unless Opsec or whatever has badly decayed since then. That's not impossible.
The mentions of the account in the files are from anonymous tips, some of which are highly absurd. They vetted a lot of tips, and I saw no information in the new releases indicating they thought it held water. We've seen the subpoena and IP tracking for the Epstein prison guard whistleblower, but no such thing on this topic.
He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.
- moot was fundraising for his VC backed startup during the years the emails are in, and he was likely connected via mutuals in USV or other firms. These meetings were clearly around him trying to solicit investment in his canv.as project.
- /pol/ was /new/ being returned; the ethos of the board had already existed for a long time and the decision to undo the deletion of /new/ was entirely unsurprising for denizens at the time, and was consistent with a concerted push moot was making for more transparency in the enforcement of rules on the site and fairness towards users who followed the rules. /pol/ didn't start a culture war at this time any more than /new/ had previously - it just existed as a relatively content-unmoderated platform for people to discuss earnestly what would get them banned elsewhere.
Besides /new/ there was also /n/ (not at that time about transportation.) Moot's war with people being racist on 4chan had many back and forths before /pol/ was created.
Given the "nature" of 4chan (only a few hundred posts and a few thousand comments at a time, the vast majority of it shitposts and spam), it just can't do that. The imageboard format and limits basically prevent any scaling and mainstream success. If you follow any of the general threads in pol or sp for a while, you'll spot the same few people all the time, it's a tiny community of active users.
I think the logic is Pol didn't need to reach the masses, the masses only consume content they don't create it. You only need to radicalize the few people who then go on to be the 1% of people commenting and posting.
There's an old joke that 9gag* only reposts stuff from Reddit and Reddit only reposts stuff from 4chan and 4chan is the origin of all meme culture. This joke was widespread enough to reach myself and my friend group back in the day, even though none of used 4chan or Reddit.
If you radicalise the 0.01% of people who are prolific meme creators, you radicalise the masses.
I always wondered how much of a cultural etc influence 4Chan actually had (has?) - so much of the mindset and vernacular that was popular there 10+ years ago is now completely mainstream.
Ah, a rare opportunity to share a blog post that had a big effect on my political outlook back in 2016, Meme Magic Is Real, You Guys
Who can say what effect it had on the world, but a presidential candidate reposting himself personified as Pepe the frog was still weird back then, and at least a nod to the trolls doing so much work on his behalf
Summary: Trump used memes not in the sense of pepes but in the original (Dawkins') sense of "earworm" soundbites, along with a torrent of scandals, each making the previous seem like old news, to exploit a public tired of the "status quo" into voting for a zany wildcard pushing for reactionary policy
Internet trolls want attention. When the internet gives trolls attention and said that the trolls are culturally and politically important and dangerous it is exactly what was desired.
That many serious commentators didn't see this was itself very funny as anything with lots of attention on the internet does become influential! It is funny to a troll to see people pay serious attention to them "I am just a clown and they think I'm serious!". But don't think that they were actual comedians, lol, they are as serious as HN users.
In the dawkins sense of the word: the "meme" wants to spread and grow and the mechanism for it's virality was the immune response to it.
On another angle, the responses also gave the target an identity. Groups get defined as groups from outside more than from within. And it's always a wrong characterisation which also helps define the in group in relation. "You guys are all toxic Linux dude bros" inside: "but some of us love macs and windows, and some of us are girls, they sure dont understand our ways"
I hardly think an internet image of a cartoon frog heavily influenced American elections, despite a surface-level co-option by various Republican politicians.
I'm just saying, it's a symptom. The crazy found critical mass, broke containment. From there it was laundered in millions of Facebook groups and here we are.
You’re acting as if https://doge.gov does not exist. Ask yourself under which presidency, administration and kind of politics such is allowed to even exist with a straight face.
Just to substantiate this a bit: I remember a gleeful consensus in certain circles being that /pol/ and /r/the_donald had "memed Trump into the White House". It's much more complicated than that, but there's certainly an element of truth there.
Then Reddit and almost all of social media went on to purge trump and pro trump content. The Donald was banned. Trump deplatformed across social media.
That's true, but not really relevant to this discussion. You can't really deplatform a president; yes he was no longer on Twitter, but roughly 8 billion people listen any time he speaks.
That subreddit was banned far too late. They had been urging for violence and hatred for quite some time. But action was taken only after the clowns inside of it were declaring they'd murder police officers executing a warrant (regarding legislators staying home to block quorum or whatever it was).
Of course in 2026 it is apparently fine to break into homes without a warrant and execute protesters. The same people are able to "believe" two literally opposite concepts.
2015 - 2016 reddit was exploited to hell by the_donald and other associated reddits. Things like coordinated up voting of a pinned post to get it to shoot up the front page, private chats to manipulate voting in a page.
There would be times when you would go to the r/all and half the page would be posts from them.
Not to mention a lot of the organized harassment a lot of the mods/power users of that sub caused in the years after. It was a mess.
Hey quick question, around January 2021, what would happened that caused Trump to be deplatformed? Anything stick out in your mind?
The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.
And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.
From moot's perspective, it can be as simple as being convinced by some rich guy you've never heard of to bring back the politics board. He doesn't need to have an intent to start a fascist coup, that's Epstein's job. GamerGate is just the point at which moot realized he'd fucked up and destroyed 4chan imageboard culture by letting /pol/ fester.
Thanks, trying to figure out the timeline relative to the board's creation given how close they are. The first email I can find related to a meeting is this one from Boris Nikolic on Oct 20th, with /pol/ on the 23rd.
Re the OCR, I'm currently running allenai/olmocr-2-7b against all the PDFs with text in them, comparing with the OCR DOJ provided, and a lot it doesn't match, and surprisingly olmocr-2-7b is quite good at this. However, after extracing the pages from the PDFs, I'm currently sitting on ~500K images to OCR, so this is currently taking quite a while to run through.
Did you take any steps to decrease the dimension size of images, if this increases the performance? I have not tried this as I have not peformed an OCR task like this with an LLM. I would be interested to know at what size the vlm cannot make out the details in text reliably.
The performance is OK, takes a couple of seconds at most on my GPU, just the amount of documents to get through that takes time, even with parallelism. The dimension seems fine as it is, as far as I can tell.
Haven't seen anything particular about that, but lots of the documents with names that were half-redacted contain OCRd text that is completely garbled, but olmocr-2-7b seems to handle it just fine. Unsure if they just had sucky processes or if there is something else going on.
Was my first impulse too but not sure I trust that unless I could gather a bunch of people I trust, which would mean I'd no longer be anonymous. Kind of a catch22.
Are they being removed or replaced with more heavily redacted documents? There were definitely some victim names that slipped through the cracks that have since been redacted.
Initially under "Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R.4405)" on https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures, all datasets had .zip links. I first saw that page when all but dataset 11 (or 10) had a .zip link. At one point this morning, all the .zip links were removed, now it seems like most are back again.
Pretty devious tactic if so. Chilling effect on both any further witnesses and anybody interested in archiving the data (gives them an ethical conundrum at least). In addition to giving them (the feds) a convenient excuse to take down random docs.
DOJ are technically breakng the law by releasing a heavily moddified "reproduction" of the original files, not the "actual" files. The software they used "OmniPage CSDK 21.1" removes all usefull metadata and any encrypted files if any where stored.
Any guesses why some of the newest files seem to have random ”=” characters in the text? My first thought was OCR, but it seemed to not be linked to characters like ”E” that could be mistakenly interpreted by an OCR tool. My second guess is just making it more difficult to produce reliable text searches, but probably 90% of HN readers could find a way to make a search tool that does not fall apart in case a ”=” character is found (although making this work for long search queries would make the search slower).
Follow the money root cause analysis never reaches the public, although the analysis will impact the real power shift. General public will receive just enough information so that one group of people can hate another group of people.
You think the personal lawyers of Donald Trump Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche will follow the money unbiasedly? As well as children's book, The Plot Against the King, author Kash Patel and FBI director? As well as Russian asset herself, Tulsa Gabbard director of National Intelligence want to do anything against their power source?
Im not too deep into USA politics and have very very bad memory so i dont remember how it went down. The Wikipedia article you linked says it was signed by trump.
>and then withheld files.
So did he sign that willingly in the end? Did he have to sign it? Did he cave because he said publicly he would?
Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless and couldn't get bothered with doing some work on it.
Republicans are much more implicated then democrats. And republican part protects own pedophiles and criminals while democrats are like "sure, go after him" here.
Of course, that's just like I said: Democrats were sitting on all those juicy details about pedophile Republicans for 5 years and decided to do nothing, even with elections at the door. Sure Jan.
You people need help. Nobody can be sane and that biased.
> Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless
No, they did it to protect wealthy and influential people, regardless of party.
It happens that such people are disproportionately Republican aligned, there are fewer places to hide this behavior in the Democratic tent - really just at the top - and the current POTUS seems to be very close to the center of it all.
Independently, we are learning that extremely wealthy and influential men often commit sex crimes through shared fixers like Epstein.
This is about huge wealth and power imbalances, no accountability for the wealthy and powerful, and the behavior they get away with as a result.
If there are any "good guys" here, it's Massie and Khanna for shaming Congress into forcing DOJ to release something, even while DOJ does everything it can to avoid/minimize it.
Democrats are complicit as well. Don't let them off the hook by making the mistake of thinking they're simply weak.
Democrats engaged in the same cover-up and lies and sexual abuse as the Republicans wrt Epstein. Democrats supported ICE and the murder of immigrants and citizens. Democrats supported American imperialism, oligarchy and genocide.
The parties aren't the same. Would we have the same open chaos, violence and instability under a Harris regime? Probably not. Would they have released any of the Epstein files on their own? Also probably not. Voting for the lesser (or more restrained) evil is valid when no good option exists but make no mistake the Democrats are not really a principled opposition party. It's mostly kayfabe.
Apparently he paid Peter Mandelson for UK government information of significant financial significance, which is resulting in him being disgraced for, what, third or fourth time? This time he's even been reported to the police.
Just on the redaction point, I did notice one email that looked correctly redacted but when zoomed in you could see some pixels from a few letters had escaped a little. It might be possible to reverse engineer the email just from that.
> DoJ explicitly avoids JPEG images in the PDFs probably because they appreciate that JPEGs often contain identifiable information, such as EXIF, IPTC, or XMP metadata
Maybe I'm underestimating the issue at full, but isn't this a very lightweight problem to solve? Is converting the images to lower DPI formats/versions really any easier than just stripping the metadata? Surely the DOJ and similar justice agencies have been aware of and doing this for decades at this point, right?
This is speculation but generally rules like this follow some sort of incident. e.g. Someone responds to a FOI request and accidentally discloses more information than desired due to metadata. So a blanket rule is instituted not to use a particular format.
Image metadata is the wild west of structured text. The developer of the foremost tool for dealing with it (exiftool) has made 'remove metadata' feature but still disclaims that it is not able to remove everything.
"Fairly straightforward" is incorrect. Not an authority to describe in more detail, but the most tricky blocker I'm aware of are these proprietary "MakerNote" tags from camera manufacturers, which are (often undocumented) binary blobs. exiftool might not even know what's in there, let alone how to safely remove it without corrupting the file.
On the extreme end, simply decode the image and reencode it using an encoder that you have vetted to not include any metadata.
But I agree, presumably the image data part of the file is well and exhaustively defined. I would be very interested in counterexamples that have practical consequences.
Note that there will still be concerns about stenography and fingerprinting which would warrant such a disclaimer from the creator of a tool aimed at a nontechnical audience.
Maybe they know more than we do. It may be possible to tamper with files at a deeper level. I wonder if it is also possible to use some sort of tampered compression algorithm that could mark images much like printers do with paper.
Another guess is that perhaps the step is a part of a multi-step sanitation process, and the last step(s) perform the bitmap operation.
I'm not sure about computer image generation but you can (relatively) easily fingerprint images generated by digital cameras due to sensor defects. I'll bet there is a similar problem with PC image generation where even without the EXIF data there is probably still too much side channel data leakage.
Some of the gathered data is shown here, right? Probably not all.
Now ... that's static information though. That's not really an analysis,
most definitely not an independent (open ended) analysis. And it will only
show a very incomplete part of the full picture.
This is why I think the "release the files" movement, as good as they are,
seems incomplete. I'd rather know a lot more about how they operate their
networks, getting away involving underage women. How about secret services
of other countries? Should that not also be highly important? So why is there
not really a larger investigation as well as independent analysis? Those .pdf
files alone can not tell the whole picture. That can just be the tip of the
iceberg; and it evidently involves other countries too, with Prince Andrew
being the most famous here (aka, the UK, but we already saw that other countries
also have similar issues where people suddenly had to step away from politics
when it was found out they visited the party-locations of Mr. Epstein).
Its about showing the public the whole system is corrupt and the wheels of justice have turned into squares if not entirely removed. Its the eulogy of the American justice system and probably the America as a whole. Welcome to the speedy decline
Love the forensic craft here. Worth noting that the 'recoverable redactions' story that went viral was based on older, unrelated DOJ documents — not the EFTA files, which were properly redacted. The misinformation spread faster than anyone could debunk it. Which is kind of its own forensics problem.
These folks must really have their hands full with the 3M+ pages that were recently released. Hoping for an update once they expand this work to those new files.
What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications? If they can do it to Epstein, they can do it to you, to the Washington Post journalist, to former President Clinton, etc.
Is the scope at least limited somehow? Generally I favor transparency, but of course probably the most important parts are withheld.
> What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications?
An act of congress, for one.
Also, AFAIK, federal privacy generally ends at death, as does criminal liability; so releasing government files from a federal investigation after death of the subject is generally within the realm of acceptable conduct.
Yes, I forgot about that major part of the story! Still, acts of Congress can't violate Consitutional rights.
It seems unlikely you lose all rights when you die or it would be chaos - imagine all the secrets people die with that affect everyone they know. An integral part of every estate plan would be incinerating records. Wills do have real power.
Your estate retains many of your rights when you die. However, the federal privacy act explicitly does not apply. Your estate may have privacy rights via the Constitution, although privacy is not specifically enumerated. Your estate may have privacy rights via state law; but that wouldn't bar the federal government from disclosing its investigative materials.
OTOH, there's a 2004 case, National Archives & Records Administration v. Favish[1], which establishes the surviving family's right of privacy to death scene photos, but that's technically not privacy of the deceased.
In my late teens, I worked as a bill collector. If I suspected an account owner was deceased, I'd call the Social Security Administration and ask them if they had a certificate of death on file. If they didn't, they'd tell me they couldn't comment. If they did, they'd say so, because dead people don't have a right to privacy.
Given what we've seen so far, there's probably some very interesting stuff in Clinton's private files and communications. Not to mention the stuff in current president Trump's. Some random journalist, probably not. Unless it's a very wealthy and/or connected journalist like David Brooks...
We're in early February 2025 [edit:2026] and the article was written on Dec 23, 2025, which makes it less than two months old. I think it's ok not to include a year in the submission title in that case.
I personally understand a year in the submission as a warning that the article may not be up to date.
Stylometry works. I've seen it used it cases where the individual was identified from a group.
One thing that is telling about the Epstein case study is how long it has stayed in public view. Pizzagate, which involved more powerful people, was shut down faster than I've ever seen for anything else. I still remember and have archived the more extreme content it's sick.
Pizzagate was 4chan fanfiction. The Epstein files are real enough to have real consequences, although mostly for people outside the US accountability shield.
I found this part interesting:
There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easily be measured, such as with VOL00007\IMAGES\0001\EFTA00009229.pdf. It is highly likely these PDFs were created by rendering original content (from a digital document) to an image (e.g., via print to image or save to image functionality) and then applying image processing such as skew, downscaling, and color reduction.
GNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly.
That seq is probably supposed to be $(seq 0.05 0.05 0.5). Right now it's always 0.05.
Note that you can get random numbers straight from bash with $RANDOM. It's 15 bit (0 to 32767) but good enough here; this would get between 0.05 and 0.5: $(printf "0.%.4d\n" $((500 + RANDOM % 4501)))
Shouldn't $ROTATION be set inside the loop and actually used in the magick command?
You know, now that you point it out that seems obvious. I think maybe I was experimenting with rotation and left that in, unused. I did this years ago. The loop works OK though. Thanks for the feedback (and now I have to finish editing that script ...)
Nothing about this is specific to GNOME, right? Imagemagick is cross-platform
I guess the Gnome-specific part is that Gnome comes with the Nautilus file browser, and the instructions add a script for Nautilus.
But yea, this will work as long as you have imagemagick and Nautilus installed.
Oh I missed that part, was just looking at the script
or just run script and input pdf as argument...
I like https://lookscanned.io/
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you sound as grumpy as my cat looks. there's no need for this language
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The real question is: Which of the documents are the ones that are "simulating" scanned documents, and what political narrative do they reinforce?
The only reason I can think of for why someone would want to do this is to pass off fraudulent or AI generated images as real.
A simpler explanation could be wanting to skip the print->sign->scan ceremony required by some institutions.
This. Slip in a few thousand “fakes” with the trove of goods to be able to fabricate a narrative.
Another explanation is that it's simply one form of lazy ineffective obfuscation performed by inexperienced relative luddites in an attempt to walk the fine line between complying with the supreme court directive & not releasing anything useful.
Other investigations into the files have found oddities like redaction of the word "don't" indicating a haphazard find-&-replace approach to redaction, possibly LLM-aided.
The DOJ/Akamai online hosted search feature is also incomplete - potentially due to some of these "digitally scanned" files not being subject to OCR.
> to pass off fraudulent or AI generated images as real.
Possibly but I don't find it compelling, if only because a significant portion of the media reportage on the files has made claims that are entirely baseless - if there were a narrative to be sold one would expect such reportage to be actively leveraging such fraudulent images.
Very interesting. That document in particular seems to be an interview of A. Acosta by the DoJ from 2019. But what reason would the FBI have for pretending it's a scanned document, if it is genuine? Perhaps there's some aspect of Epstein's deal with Acosta that they'd rather not reveal to the public?
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%207/EFTA000092...
Not that I can speak from personal experience or anything... But somebody on an email chain may have requested a scanned version of the document to ensure there is no metadata and the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document. There might even be a webtool available somewhere to do so, I wouldn't know...
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Straight to the signup page? A bit blatant, no?
> the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document
Is that remotely plausible? I can't imaging faking a scan being easier than just walking down the hall to the copier room.
If I look at my personal work situation, working from home would mean I can't do it immediately, but would have to remember to do it the next day. Or just do it digitally right now in a few minutes and have it off my to-do list
Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to laziness, these are government workers
I think maybe the old "don't attribute to malice" adage goes out the window when we're talking about a coverup of a giant child sex trafficking ring run by high-up people in the government.
While I don't disagree with your point about Epstein case being a massive cya for a ton of people in power, the fact is that if they deeply wanted to cover up something the right way to do it would to be to actually print it and scan it, this does look like someone shortcutted some broad order to print and scan all digital media.
It's thousands of pages, surely investing some time in a script is faster. They were in a rush as well.
If they were faking the documents rather than the delivery method they definitely could have invested some time in flawless looks.
Or more-realistic flawed looks as the case is here.
The time advantage of faking a scan becomes better the more pages you have to scan.
https://xkcd.com/1205/
Nice. But 5 years seems unrealistic. Who stays on the same job using same processes 5 years these days? Even if the task might remain the same, input formats might change, requiring extra maintenance to the tool. Should recalculate that for 3 years before using it in my automation decisions.
you do not work in the public sector, where processes change rarely, slowly, and partially
If it's already scanned, then you don't have to leave your desk.
Working from home and no scanner in the house?
No printer.
Look, what I'm saying is that I don't have a scanner at home or at work and I've find this.
You’re talking about 1,000 FBI agents locked in a building. There’s no printer.
Depending on their technical capability, yes.
I mean even in this thread you got what are essentially one-liners to do it.
Definitely less hassle then doing it irl
Hoe big a percentage of FBI / DoJ employees are running linux (with imagemagick) as their work computer? I'd be surprised to see a similar oneliner for a stock windows installation.
Yeah they might have used some web converter, but that on the other hand would have been extremely incompetent handling of the secret data.
Installing MSYS2 is a matter of a few minutes. There is also WSL and macOS features a POSIX shell, imagemagick is likely already installed as a dependency somewhere, like ffmpeg often also is.
I know I'm not the brightest bulb by any measure, but do some people really take less than at least a few minutes to come up with one-liners for problems as novel as graphical transformations to PDFs? Maybe if the presumed techie hacker / federal worker took it as an amusing challenge I could see this being done, but genuinely out of pure laziness? That's incredible if true.
It's not a novel problem. But yes, I don't think people quite appreciate how quick and easy it is for people who are in the habit of brewing up one-liners to solve simple problems to do that. I've done it here on HN for jq toy problems before, and I don't really doubt there are people similarly familiar with imagemagick.
It’s a mix of “they’ve done it many times before” and these days AI. But remember the “they’ve done it many times before” just means that in a technical and popular forum you’re likely to find the handful of people who have done so regularly enough to remember the one liner. Also this is probably easily searchable as well so even prior to AI not super hard.
There is nothing novel about it. I saw at least one person say that they have done exactly the same thing out of laziness.
I am only guessing that they had to remove the document from a classified network in a way where data won't possibly leak
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Such a weird way to do it when it would be a vastly easier to just blow the document out to paper and re-scan it.
Vastly easier when you do it to one or a handful of documents.
But if you want to do it to 2000 documents...
But at that point why bother with the fakery? Why does it matter if it's obviously of digital origin? As long as it's rendered down to an image problem solved.
Was the motivation for this benign (an employee skirting regulations) or malicious?
4 reems (4×500) is hardly a lot for commercial equipment to handle - paper trays will take a reem at a time. Document analysis would still show some shenanigans were in play, but you'd get a bit of variation at least.
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I mean, I do that all the time when they ask me to print something, sign it, and then scan it.
Sign a blank paper, scan it, paste the original doc on it. Then keep the scan for future docs.
An easier trick I've used is just sign directly on the computer screen over the displayed document with a whiteboard marker and take a photo with my phone.
Has anyone analysed JE's writing style and looked for matches in archived 4chan posts or content from similar platforms? Same with Ghislaine, there should be enough data to identify them atp right? I don't buy the MaxwellHill claims for various reasons but it doesn't mean there's nothing to find.
There was a post on here about a project in stylometry that analyzed HN users comment history. The tool helped find accounts that had an extremely similar writing style to a given account. The site was soon removed due to privacy concerns but many users with multiple account attested to its accuracy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
It turns out stylometry is actually a pretty well-developed field. It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me
>It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me
The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?
The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?
If you want to be grouped with foreigners who don't know English, it might work well, although word choices may still be distinctive enough to differentiate even when translated.
Assuming the source language is English, going to a romance language and back wouldn't be too hard grammar wise, but could easily wipe out a lot of non-Latin-descended words if you use the right approach to translation.
"We are pretty sure the target is an Anglishman, which definitely narrows our field but maybe a bit too much."
On the one side it's a shame this tool was removed because it's very interesting, but on the other hand, the main use case would likely abuse and (cyber)stalking.
That said, best to assume that the various government agencies have tools like this, and better - if you're trying to hide your identity online, don't just change users or go through VPNS/proxies/TOR but change your writing style too.
(Also I'm convinced most VPNs/ proxies / TOR nodes / public access points are honeypots)
A while back the government claimed it had used stylometry to identify Satoshi Nakamoto.
I remember using one of these tools and it falsely identified some other account as being mine. Of course, I only have just this account.
Stylometry is extremely sophisticated even with simple n-gram analysis. There's a demo of this that can easily pick out who you are on HN just based on a few paragraphs of your own writing, based on N-gram analysis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way. The approaches based on training another transformer to spot "AI generated" content are wrong.
> You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way.
I have no idea if specialized tools can reliably detect AI writing but, as someone whose writing on forums like HN has been accused a couple of times of being AI, I can say that humans aren't very good at it. So far, my limited experience with being falsely accused is it seems to partly just be a bias against being a decent writer with a good vocabulary who sometimes writes longer posts.
As for the reliability of specialized tools in detecting AI writing, I'm skeptical at a conceptual level because an LLM can be reinforcement trained with feedback from such a tool (RLTF instead of RLHF). While they may be somewhat reliable at the moment, it seems unlikely they'll stay that way.
Unfortunately, since there are already companies marketing 'AI detectors' to academic institutions, they won't stop marketing them as their reliability continues to get worse. Which will probably result in an increasing shit show of false accusations against students.
> I can say that humans aren't very good at it
You're assuming the people making accusations of posts being written by AI are from humans (which I agree are not good at making this determination). However, computers analyzing massive datasets are likely to be much better at it , and this can also be a Werewolf/Mafia/Killers-type situation where AI frequently accuses posters it believes are human, of being AI, to diminish the severity of accusations and blend in better.
Are you impugning intent on the LLM's part?
Well, humans might be great at detecting AI (few false negatives) but might falsely accuse humans more often (higher false positive rate). You might be among a set of humans being falsely accused a lot, but that's just proof that "heuristic stylometry" is consistent, it doesn't really say anything about the size of that set.
Thing is, people are on the lookout for obvious AI and I'm sure they have been successful a few times. But this is like confirmation bias, they will never know whether they saw / read something AI generated if they didn't clock it in the first place.
I'm on Reddit too much and a few times there were memes or whatever that were later on pointed out to be AI. And that's the ones that had tells, more and more (and as price goes down / effort/expenditure increases) it will become harder to impossible to tell.
And I have mixed feelings. I don't mind so much for memes, there's little difference between low-effort image editing and low-effort image generation IMO. There's the "advice" / "story" posts which for a long time now have been more of a creative writing effort than true stories, it's a race to the bottom already and AI will only try and accellerate it. But sometimes it's entertaining.
But "fake news" is the dangerous one, and I'm disappointed that combating this seemed to be a passing fad now that the big tech companies and their leaders / shareholders have bent the knee to regimes that are very interested in spreading disinformation/propaganda to push their agenda under people's skins subtly. I'm surprised it's not more egregious tbh, but maybe it's because my internet bubbles are aligned with my own opinions/morals/etc at the moment.
Another possibility is that you are actually an AI and don't know it.
Hacker News is one of the best places for this, because people write relatively long posts and generally try to have novel ideas. On 4chan, most posts are very short memey quips, so everybody's style is closer to each others than it is to their normal writing style.
Funnily this also implies that laundering your writing through an AI is a good way to defeat stylometry. You add in a strong enough signal, and hopefully smooth out the rest.
Why are they wrong? Surely it depends on how you train it?
People always claimed this as a data leak vector but I've always been sceptical. Like just writing style and vocabulary is probably extremely shared among too many people to narrow it down much. (How people that you know could have written this reply?) The counter argument is that he had a very specific style in his mail so maybe this is a special case.
If you have a large enough set to test against and a specific person you are looking for, this is totally doable currently.
Of course it's doable. The question is how reliable the results are.
I wonder if it works on zoomers too. I have noticed a slight mode collapse among this population ;)
Not to mention, I'd argue that most people have a (subtly?) different writing style depending on where they post and to who they talk to.
It just needs to find the needles in the haystack. Humans can better verify if they're truly needles.
Not just a test set, but enough of a set to search through and compare against. Several pages of in-depth writing isn't anywhere near sufficient, even when limiting the search space to ~10k people.
this is a well-studied field (stylometry). when combining writing styles, vocabulary, posting times, etc. you absolutely can narrow it down to specific people.
even when people deliberately try to feign some aspects (e.g. switching writing styles for different pseudonyms), they will almost always slip up and revert to their most comfortable style over time. which is great, because if they aren't also regularly changing pseudonyms (which are also subject to limited stylometry, so pseudonym creation should be somewhat randomized in name, location, etc.), you only need to catch them slipping once to get the whole history of that pseudonym (and potentially others, once that one is confirmed).
Stylometry is okay if you're trying to deanonymize a large enough sample text. A reddit account would be doable. But individual 4chan posts? You barely have enough content within the text limit.
People do change over time, I used to write "ha" after every sentence for some reason
You know, i had a particularly cringy period in which i put "la" at the end of sentences.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. "Ooh, la" sounds really unnatural.
But on a serious note, what did "la" mean in your context? I've never seen this.
It’s a common thing for speakers of Singaporean English to end sentences with la/leh. But no idea if that’s what’s going on here.
In one use case, it is kind of a verbal exclamation point, but it has more meanings and uses than just that. Likely originates from Hokkien, but it has evolved into it is own thing. If you are curious, more details here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish
In Turkish la at the end disrespectfully refers to a male person.
You left off something.
sure, not denying that. my writing style is fairly different now in my 40s than it was in my late teens/early twenties.
but, those changes are usually pretty gradual and relatively small. thats why when attempting to identify someone via writing, you look at several aspects of the writing and not just word choice (grammar, use of specific slang, sentence length, paragraph structure, punctuation, etc.). it is highly unlikely that all aspects of someones writing changes at the same time. simply removing "ha" is inconsequential to identification if not much else changed.
additionally, this data is typically combined with other data/patterns (posting times, username (themes, length, etc.), writing that displays certain types of expertise, and more) to increase the confidence level of correct identification.
The writing style is rather interesting. Epstein seems borderline dyslexic, but almost none of the emails I've seen are written in a coherent way, regardless of the sender.
Either people on that level rarely write anything on their own and have completely forgotten how to construct proper sentences or maybe that just how they communicate. Sort of language internal to the group.
I had a boss who was too impatient to hear a full sentence most of the time, and respected absolutely no one. She typed like this.
I haven't looked at the files, nor followed the technical analysis much, but in case you missed it, some of that incoherency may be a processing glitch discussed a couple of days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868759
Yeah, I saw that and no, that's not what I mean. Some of the conversations reads like incoherent ramblings, completely devoid of context, answers that seems unrelated. Even when we have a "full" thread of conversation, it's really hard to parse the messages and make sense of them. It sometimes read like maybe they have their own language.
Some people postes conversations, and comments, but I don't feel like they actually grasp what's being discused and they just latches on to key words.
> I don't buy the MaxwellHill claims for various reasons
Why not? Clear motive, matching timeline, mentions of that reddit account in the released FBI documents of her case
I was there for the original thread making the connection so I got a very fresh look at the profile. The user was consistently referring to being in dental school. A lot of posting, and not in ways that would influence opinions. Maybe a cover for more secretive mod actions, but it'd be a wastefully excessive cover.
Other mods knew them personally and were still in contact. The user claims they heard of the rumor and decided not to reactivate for the lulz.
I am not familiar with the mod side of reddit - couldn't fellow mods audit her mod action logs to find more juicy details we would have heard about by now?
If Maxwell is indeed a spy and doing what she is claimed to do, it is highly unlikely that she'd put her last name and a reference to her specific family's property in her username. This would be a glaringly arrogant choice for someone who had been groomed from an early age for spycraft, and who had any degree of oversight.
If she were part of a spy network, they would be highly remiss not to commandeer the account at the time of her arrest to avoid suspicion unless they were completely incompetent.
I am mostly familiar with cold war espionage so it just doesn't sound like the general MO to me. Unless Opsec or whatever has badly decayed since then. That's not impossible.
The mentions of the account in the files are from anonymous tips, some of which are highly absurd. They vetted a lot of tips, and I saw no information in the new releases indicating they thought it held water. We've seen the subpoena and IP tracking for the Epstein prison guard whistleblower, but no such thing on this topic.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
I'm pretty sure Epstein tried to meet with moot at least once: https://www.jmail.world/search?q=chris+poole
He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.
Few thoughts: in context it's not nuts at all:
- moot was fundraising for his VC backed startup during the years the emails are in, and he was likely connected via mutuals in USV or other firms. These meetings were clearly around him trying to solicit investment in his canv.as project.
- /pol/ was /new/ being returned; the ethos of the board had already existed for a long time and the decision to undo the deletion of /new/ was entirely unsurprising for denizens at the time, and was consistent with a concerted push moot was making for more transparency in the enforcement of rules on the site and fairness towards users who followed the rules. /pol/ didn't start a culture war at this time any more than /new/ had previously - it just existed as a relatively content-unmoderated platform for people to discuss earnestly what would get them banned elsewhere.
Besides /new/ there was also /n/ (not at that time about transportation.) Moot's war with people being racist on 4chan had many back and forths before /pol/ was created.
Given the "nature" of 4chan (only a few hundred posts and a few thousand comments at a time, the vast majority of it shitposts and spam), it just can't do that. The imageboard format and limits basically prevent any scaling and mainstream success. If you follow any of the general threads in pol or sp for a while, you'll spot the same few people all the time, it's a tiny community of active users.
I think the logic is Pol didn't need to reach the masses, the masses only consume content they don't create it. You only need to radicalize the few people who then go on to be the 1% of people commenting and posting.
There's an old joke that 9gag* only reposts stuff from Reddit and Reddit only reposts stuff from 4chan and 4chan is the origin of all meme culture. This joke was widespread enough to reach myself and my friend group back in the day, even though none of used 4chan or Reddit.
If you radicalise the 0.01% of people who are prolific meme creators, you radicalise the masses.
* I did say old...
And Facebook repeats stuff from 9gag
I always wondered how much of a cultural etc influence 4Chan actually had (has?) - so much of the mindset and vernacular that was popular there 10+ years ago is now completely mainstream.
Ah, a rare opportunity to share a blog post that had a big effect on my political outlook back in 2016, Meme Magic Is Real, You Guys
Who can say what effect it had on the world, but a presidential candidate reposting himself personified as Pepe the frog was still weird back then, and at least a nod to the trolls doing so much work on his behalf
https://medium.com/tryangle-magazine/meme-magic-is-real-you-... (dismissable login wall)
Counterpoint: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0
Summary: Trump used memes not in the sense of pepes but in the original (Dawkins') sense of "earworm" soundbites, along with a torrent of scandals, each making the previous seem like old news, to exploit a public tired of the "status quo" into voting for a zany wildcard pushing for reactionary policy
I remember in high school finding the whole nazi thing funny. They were literal losers in ww2. It was like drawing a communist hammer and sickle.
Looking back on it, I wonder if this was priming.
I didn't fall for it. They are still losers, but the encyclopedia dramatica with swastikas looks way way way less funny in 2026 than it did in 2008.
Internet trolls want attention. When the internet gives trolls attention and said that the trolls are culturally and politically important and dangerous it is exactly what was desired.
That many serious commentators didn't see this was itself very funny as anything with lots of attention on the internet does become influential! It is funny to a troll to see people pay serious attention to them "I am just a clown and they think I'm serious!". But don't think that they were actual comedians, lol, they are as serious as HN users.
In the dawkins sense of the word: the "meme" wants to spread and grow and the mechanism for it's virality was the immune response to it.
On another angle, the responses also gave the target an identity. Groups get defined as groups from outside more than from within. And it's always a wrong characterisation which also helps define the in group in relation. "You guys are all toxic Linux dude bros" inside: "but some of us love macs and windows, and some of us are girls, they sure dont understand our ways"
/pol/ in no way started the American culture war. It was brewing for a while.
pol was made to contain all posting on the American culture war so it could be banned from the other (more active) boards
Well, broke the levee if you will. Otherwise, explain Pepe.
I hardly think an internet image of a cartoon frog heavily influenced American elections, despite a surface-level co-option by various Republican politicians.
I agree completely.
I'm just saying, it's a symptom. The crazy found critical mass, broke containment. From there it was laundered in millions of Facebook groups and here we are.
You’re acting as if https://doge.gov does not exist. Ask yourself under which presidency, administration and kind of politics such is allowed to even exist with a straight face.
It would've existed regardless of internet memes, just under a different and similarly obnoxious name.
You actually think if we replayed society and magically shut off internet memes it would have played out the exact same but under a different name?
More or less, but it depends on what is classed as an internet meme.
In no way?
Just to substantiate this a bit: I remember a gleeful consensus in certain circles being that /pol/ and /r/the_donald had "memed Trump into the White House". It's much more complicated than that, but there's certainly an element of truth there.
https://www.wired.com/story/dale-beran-it-came-from-somethin...
This is a good book about it.
Then Reddit and almost all of social media went on to purge trump and pro trump content. The Donald was banned. Trump deplatformed across social media.
That's true, but not really relevant to this discussion. You can't really deplatform a president; yes he was no longer on Twitter, but roughly 8 billion people listen any time he speaks.
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That subreddit was banned far too late. They had been urging for violence and hatred for quite some time. But action was taken only after the clowns inside of it were declaring they'd murder police officers executing a warrant (regarding legislators staying home to block quorum or whatever it was).
Of course in 2026 it is apparently fine to break into homes without a warrant and execute protesters. The same people are able to "believe" two literally opposite concepts.
2015 - 2016 reddit was exploited to hell by the_donald and other associated reddits. Things like coordinated up voting of a pinned post to get it to shoot up the front page, private chats to manipulate voting in a page.
There would be times when you would go to the r/all and half the page would be posts from them.
Not to mention a lot of the organized harassment a lot of the mods/power users of that sub caused in the years after. It was a mess.
Hey quick question, around January 2021, what would happened that caused Trump to be deplatformed? Anything stick out in your mind?
As I see it, Trump was a symptom of something older.. no matter what effort were made to slow / avoid the issues, the mania was still growing.
be gentile
We're just not going to talk about that one I suppose?
'Sensitive' in this context can mean antisemitic. At least that's how I've heard this joke used.
Must be russian or qatari humour <|:o)
Care to speak plainly? I am baffled by this comment.
I don’t agree with this analysis.
The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.
And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.
From moot's perspective, it can be as simple as being convinced by some rich guy you've never heard of to bring back the politics board. He doesn't need to have an intent to start a fascist coup, that's Epstein's job. GamerGate is just the point at which moot realized he'd fucked up and destroyed 4chan imageboard culture by letting /pol/ fester.
Which meeting are you seeing? That search doesn't seem to work for me, I'm only seeing the one Jan 2012.
It doesn't show up in JMail for some reason, but it's this email: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01852...
Thanks, trying to figure out the timeline relative to the board's creation given how close they are. The first email I can find related to a meeting is this one from Boris Nikolic on Oct 20th, with /pol/ on the 23rd.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01992...
What is the theory here ? that Epstein suggested the idea of breeding extreme counter culture on 4chan ?
That is a crazy amount of emails from/about moot...
Created /pol/ for epstein himself https://bsky.app/profile/kaiserbeamz.bsky.social/post/3mdou7...
A bit off-topic, but I find it kinda funny that the "Decline" button on the cookie popup on this page is labled "Continue without consent".
They're really trying to guilt trip you.
Proceed, but unwillingly
Damn, so the website about the Epstein is Epstein too
Re the OCR, I'm currently running allenai/olmocr-2-7b against all the PDFs with text in them, comparing with the OCR DOJ provided, and a lot it doesn't match, and surprisingly olmocr-2-7b is quite good at this. However, after extracing the pages from the PDFs, I'm currently sitting on ~500K images to OCR, so this is currently taking quite a while to run through.
Did you take any steps to decrease the dimension size of images, if this increases the performance? I have not tried this as I have not peformed an OCR task like this with an LLM. I would be interested to know at what size the vlm cannot make out the details in text reliably.
The performance is OK, takes a couple of seconds at most on my GPU, just the amount of documents to get through that takes time, even with parallelism. The dimension seems fine as it is, as far as I can tell.
[flagged]
Haven't seen anything particular about that, but lots of the documents with names that were half-redacted contain OCRd text that is completely garbled, but olmocr-2-7b seems to handle it just fine. Unsure if they just had sucky processes or if there is something else going on.
Might be a good fit for uploading a git repo and crowdsourcing
Was my first impulse too but not sure I trust that unless I could gather a bunch of people I trust, which would mean I'd no longer be anonymous. Kind of a catch22.
GitHub would ban you
> Information leakage may also be occurring via PDF comments or orphaned objects inside compressed object streams, as I discovered above.
hopefully someone is independently archiving all documents
my understanding is that some are being removed
Reddit is also removing and shadowbannig such posts, but there's a community on https://lemmy.world/post/42440468
What interest would Reddit have in suppressing the backup of official, public, government document releases?
FWIW https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_...
Take with a grain of salt, obviously.
Quite a lot of individual subreddit moderators are Trump supporters. Or the site itself has a very over-broad view of what constitutes "doxing".
Perhaps a few subreddits are pro-Trump, but Reddit is well known to be very left leaning on the whole.
Are they being removed or replaced with more heavily redacted documents? There were definitely some victim names that slipped through the cracks that have since been redacted.
Initially under "Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R.4405)" on https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures, all datasets had .zip links. I first saw that page when all but dataset 11 (or 10) had a .zip link. At one point this morning, all the .zip links were removed, now it seems like most are back again.
I think some of the released documents included images of victims, which where redacted. So it's not necessarily malicious removals
That's my understanding too, so archiving the unredacted images could mean holding CSAM.
Which is of course very convenient for the government, similar to when wikileaks got prosecuted for holding state secrets.
If we're assuming they didn't leave victims unredacted on purpose
Pretty devious tactic if so. Chilling effect on both any further witnesses and anybody interested in archiving the data (gives them an ethical conundrum at least). In addition to giving them (the feds) a convenient excuse to take down random docs.
Not about a ethical conondrum when rehosting. Anyone who rehosts the whole files can be accused of hosting child porn and doxxing and taken down.
Very convenient for Epstein and his associates
Looking at examples it looks way more like incompetence.
DOJ are technically breakng the law by releasing a heavily moddified "reproduction" of the original files, not the "actual" files. The software they used "OmniPage CSDK 21.1" removes all usefull metadata and any encrypted files if any where stored.
Any guesses why some of the newest files seem to have random ”=” characters in the text? My first thought was OCR, but it seemed to not be linked to characters like ”E” that could be mistakenly interpreted by an OCR tool. My second guess is just making it more difficult to produce reliable text searches, but probably 90% of HN readers could find a way to make a search tool that does not fall apart in case a ”=” character is found (although making this work for long search queries would make the search slower).
Was on the frontpage yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868759
Thanks a lot!
The equal characters are due to poor handling of quoted-printable in email.
The author of gnus, Lars Ingebrigtsen, wrote a blog post explaining this. His post was on the HN front page today.
He explained the newline thing that confused me. Good read!
What would be more interesting: His Bank accounts.
Who paid him?
Who did get paid?
Follow the money root cause analysis never reaches the public, although the analysis will impact the real power shift. General public will receive just enough information so that one group of people can hate another group of people.
And for sure the DOJ knows this, or can know it if they want.
You think the personal lawyers of Donald Trump Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche will follow the money unbiasedly? As well as children's book, The Plot Against the King, author Kash Patel and FBI director? As well as Russian asset herself, Tulsa Gabbard director of National Intelligence want to do anything against their power source?
Yet this was released under their term and not previous presidential terms
> previous presidential terms
Term, not plural. There was one (1) interceding administration following Epstein's death.
Trump promised that the Epstein files would be released if he was reelected, and then withheld files. Congress passed a bill remediating this, hence the newer tranche of files: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein_Files_Transparency_Act
Im not too deep into USA politics and have very very bad memory so i dont remember how it went down. The Wikipedia article you linked says it was signed by trump.
>and then withheld files.
So did he sign that willingly in the end? Did he have to sign it? Did he cave because he said publicly he would?
A super majority in Congress voted for the files to be the released, which is enough to override a veto, so he had to sign it to save face.
thx for the info!!
The democrats had these files and all that information in their power for what? 5 years? And what did they do?
Stop making this a partisan issue. It’s not, and nobody that’s not completely biased beyond any rationality will ever see it as such.
Democrats do nothing because they are useless. Republicans do nothing because they are implicated.
Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless and couldn't get bothered with doing some work on it.
Seems sensible...
Republicans are much more implicated then democrats. And republican part protects own pedophiles and criminals while democrats are like "sure, go after him" here.
So, yes that is exactly what happened.
Of course, that's just like I said: Democrats were sitting on all those juicy details about pedophile Republicans for 5 years and decided to do nothing, even with elections at the door. Sure Jan.
You people need help. Nobody can be sane and that biased.
> Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless
No, they did it to protect wealthy and influential people, regardless of party.
It happens that such people are disproportionately Republican aligned, there are fewer places to hide this behavior in the Democratic tent - really just at the top - and the current POTUS seems to be very close to the center of it all.
Independently, we are learning that extremely wealthy and influential men often commit sex crimes through shared fixers like Epstein.
This is about huge wealth and power imbalances, no accountability for the wealthy and powerful, and the behavior they get away with as a result.
If there are any "good guys" here, it's Massie and Khanna for shaming Congress into forcing DOJ to release something, even while DOJ does everything it can to avoid/minimize it.
Democrats are complicit as well. Don't let them off the hook by making the mistake of thinking they're simply weak.
Democrats engaged in the same cover-up and lies and sexual abuse as the Republicans wrt Epstein. Democrats supported ICE and the murder of immigrants and citizens. Democrats supported American imperialism, oligarchy and genocide.
The parties aren't the same. Would we have the same open chaos, violence and instability under a Harris regime? Probably not. Would they have released any of the Epstein files on their own? Also probably not. Voting for the lesser (or more restrained) evil is valid when no good option exists but make no mistake the Democrats are not really a principled opposition party. It's mostly kayfabe.
Apparently he paid Peter Mandelson for UK government information of significant financial significance, which is resulting in him being disgraced for, what, third or fourth time? This time he's even been reported to the police.
Interesting, there are a handful of PDFs in the drop that appear to be an email with a Base64 encoded attachment—inline.
OCR is so bad of course that decoding the Base64 seems futile without a lot of effort.
Example: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02609...
(More mentioned here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/1qu9az2/theres_unr...)
Would a few byte errors break a binary so much as to make it undecodable ?
I think it's more than a few bytes error. (I believe this because I spent about 15 minutes on the linked document and came up empty.)
I can't even download the archive, the transmission always terminates just before its finished. Spooky.
Just on the redaction point, I did notice one email that looked correctly redacted but when zoomed in you could see some pixels from a few letters had escaped a little. It might be possible to reverse engineer the email just from that.
PDF Files about PDF Files
> DoJ explicitly avoids JPEG images in the PDFs probably because they appreciate that JPEGs often contain identifiable information, such as EXIF, IPTC, or XMP metadata
Maybe I'm underestimating the issue at full, but isn't this a very lightweight problem to solve? Is converting the images to lower DPI formats/versions really any easier than just stripping the metadata? Surely the DOJ and similar justice agencies have been aware of and doing this for decades at this point, right?
This is speculation but generally rules like this follow some sort of incident. e.g. Someone responds to a FOI request and accidentally discloses more information than desired due to metadata. So a blanket rule is instituted not to use a particular format.
Image metadata is the wild west of structured text. The developer of the foremost tool for dealing with it (exiftool) has made 'remove metadata' feature but still disclaims that it is not able to remove everything.
How could that be possible? Isn't JPEG a fairly straightforward container for JFIF+metadata?
"Fairly straightforward" is incorrect. Not an authority to describe in more detail, but the most tricky blocker I'm aware of are these proprietary "MakerNote" tags from camera manufacturers, which are (often undocumented) binary blobs. exiftool might not even know what's in there, let alone how to safely remove it without corrupting the file.
> exiftool might not even know what's in there, let alone how to safely remove it without corrupting the file.
But isn't it a contiguous sequence of data whose length is determined by the container format?
On the extreme end, simply decode the image and reencode it using an encoder that you have vetted to not include any metadata.
But I agree, presumably the image data part of the file is well and exhaustively defined. I would be very interested in counterexamples that have practical consequences.
Note that there will still be concerns about stenography and fingerprinting which would warrant such a disclaimer from the creator of a tool aimed at a nontechnical audience.
Yes, I figured that steganography, watermarks etc. are the kind of "metadata" that the tool author had in mind.
Maybe they know more than we do. It may be possible to tamper with files at a deeper level. I wonder if it is also possible to use some sort of tampered compression algorithm that could mark images much like printers do with paper.
Another guess is that perhaps the step is a part of a multi-step sanitation process, and the last step(s) perform the bitmap operation.
I'm not sure about computer image generation but you can (relatively) easily fingerprint images generated by digital cameras due to sensor defects. I'll bet there is a similar problem with PC image generation where even without the EXIF data there is probably still too much side channel data leakage.
Somebody ought to train an LLM exclusively on this text, just for funsies.
DeepSeek-V4-JEE
It would be funny (and disturbing) to add Jemini to JMail.
So I have been wondering about this ...
Some of the gathered data is shown here, right? Probably not all.
Now ... that's static information though. That's not really an analysis, most definitely not an independent (open ended) analysis. And it will only show a very incomplete part of the full picture.
This is why I think the "release the files" movement, as good as they are, seems incomplete. I'd rather know a lot more about how they operate their networks, getting away involving underage women. How about secret services of other countries? Should that not also be highly important? So why is there not really a larger investigation as well as independent analysis? Those .pdf files alone can not tell the whole picture. That can just be the tip of the iceberg; and it evidently involves other countries too, with Prince Andrew being the most famous here (aka, the UK, but we already saw that other countries also have similar issues where people suddenly had to step away from politics when it was found out they visited the party-locations of Mr. Epstein).
Its about showing the public the whole system is corrupt and the wheels of justice have turned into squares if not entirely removed. Its the eulogy of the American justice system and probably the America as a whole. Welcome to the speedy decline
Love the forensic craft here. Worth noting that the 'recoverable redactions' story that went viral was based on older, unrelated DOJ documents — not the EFTA files, which were properly redacted. The misinformation spread faster than anyone could debunk it. Which is kind of its own forensics problem.
These folks must really have their hands full with the 3M+ pages that were recently released. Hoping for an update once they expand this work to those new files.
why do we count this in "pages" when it's mostly an email dump
Based on my random poking around through the latest datasets for a few hours, while there are a bunch of emails, I don't know if it's "mostly" emails.
That said, in my opinion they are using "pages" as the metric because it makes the number sound huge.
What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications? If they can do it to Epstein, they can do it to you, to the Washington Post journalist, to former President Clinton, etc.
Is the scope at least limited somehow? Generally I favor transparency, but of course probably the most important parts are withheld.
> What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications?
An act of congress, for one.
Also, AFAIK, federal privacy generally ends at death, as does criminal liability; so releasing government files from a federal investigation after death of the subject is generally within the realm of acceptable conduct.
Yes, I forgot about that major part of the story! Still, acts of Congress can't violate Consitutional rights.
It seems unlikely you lose all rights when you die or it would be chaos - imagine all the secrets people die with that affect everyone they know. An integral part of every estate plan would be incinerating records. Wills do have real power.
Your estate retains many of your rights when you die. However, the federal privacy act explicitly does not apply. Your estate may have privacy rights via the Constitution, although privacy is not specifically enumerated. Your estate may have privacy rights via state law; but that wouldn't bar the federal government from disclosing its investigative materials.
OTOH, there's a 2004 case, National Archives & Records Administration v. Favish[1], which establishes the surviving family's right of privacy to death scene photos, but that's technically not privacy of the deceased.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/oip/blog/foia-post-2004-sup...
In my late teens, I worked as a bill collector. If I suspected an account owner was deceased, I'd call the Social Security Administration and ask them if they had a certificate of death on file. If they didn't, they'd tell me they couldn't comment. If they did, they'd say so, because dead people don't have a right to privacy.
[dead]
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405...
I assume this could not have passed while he was alive, because of the "bill of attainder" thing?
(It also surprises me that this passed anyway, given that both sides of the aisle seem to have people with clear reason to keep it covered up... ?)
(Also, Maxwell is specifically named, and is still alive... ?)
I believe a literal Act of Congress…
It was passed into law by congress and signed by the president:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein_Files_Transparency_Act
I'd assume it was the nature of the case, and that discovery was done with him being dead.
Given what we've seen so far, there's probably some very interesting stuff in Clinton's private files and communications. Not to mention the stuff in current president Trump's. Some random journalist, probably not. Unless it's a very wealthy and/or connected journalist like David Brooks...
He was a pedophile sex trafficker. Epstein and his clients deserve zero privacy.
You’ve sidestepped the important part of the question.
Who determines who deserves privacy, and how do they determine it?
That's a lot of PeDoFiles!
(But seriously, great work here!)
Elite PDF File ring
Blocked by cloudflare
(2025) just follow hn guideline, impressive voter ring though
We're in early February 2025 [edit:2026] and the article was written on Dec 23, 2025, which makes it less than two months old. I think it's ok not to include a year in the submission title in that case.
I personally understand a year in the submission as a warning that the article may not be up to date.
Less about the age, and more about confusing what they are analyzing, for the files that were just released like a week ago.
We're in Feb 2026.
I'm not used to typing it yet, either.
Generally, I'd agree with you. However, the recent Epstein file dump was in 2026, not 2025, so I would say it is relevant in this case..
"We're in early February ~2025~ *2026*"
Stylometry works. I've seen it used it cases where the individual was identified from a group.
One thing that is telling about the Epstein case study is how long it has stayed in public view. Pizzagate, which involved more powerful people, was shut down faster than I've ever seen for anything else. I still remember and have archived the more extreme content it's sick.
I probably don’t want to see it, but what kinds of people and activities are in this Pizzagate content?
Pizzagate and Epstein are the same thing
They are not. Completely different groups.
Pizzagate was 4chan fanfiction. The Epstein files are real enough to have real consequences, although mostly for people outside the US accountability shield.
This is so incredibly useful to me right now for incidental reasons I am commenting to make sure I can get back to it.
HN lets you mark submissions (and comments) as favorites, no need to spam the thread.