Literally stop publicizing this stuff until they've shown their entire hands
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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This is really great, dont tell this to anyone!
They are still releasing more parts of the Epstein files!
Take the advice of Napoleon: Never interrupt the enemy while they are making a mistake!
yeah, I'm always a bit annoyed when people laught at the incompetence.
Let them.
Heck, some of it might even be intentional. Don't take away tools for leakers
...it’s safe to say that Pam Bondi’s DoJ did not put its best and brightest on this (admittedly gargantuan) undertaking
Actually they did. It's just that their best and brightest are fairly dim.
It could also have been incompetence as a form of resistance, for all we know, or a combination of both.
This. If I didn’t agree with what they’re doing (and I don’t) and I wanted to resist I would do my best to steer towards a reversible redaction method. Then just feign ignorance.
Someone should write an update to the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
Their best and brightest were fired or retired.
Well it’s all the leftovers at this point. When the priority is loyalty, performance suffers.
Amazing what a bit of knowledge, intelligence and competency can achieve.
Inversely, it’s also amazing what a lack thereof cannot achieve, for instance, redacting publicized documents.
We just need those 76 page base64 printouts stuffed into captcha so we can crowdsource cracking them
I actually like this idea a lot (the crowdfunding part)
crowdsource, not crowdfund. One is sharing the work, the other is sharing the cost.
Is that nitpick really necessary? I would be donating my time, that's my cost. So crowdfunded wouldn't even be wrong unless you believe your time to be worthless.
It's not a nitpick for me but a relevant clarification to distinguish between two very different words.
I tried to leave a comment, but it doesn't seem to be showing up there.
I'll just leave it here:
too tired to look into this, one suggestion though - since the hangup seems to be comparing an L and a 1, maybe you need to get into per-pixel measurements. This might be necessary if the effectiveness of ML or OCR models isn't at least 99.5% for a document containing thousands of ambiguous L's. Any inaccuracies from an ML or OCR model will leave you guessing 2^N candidates which becomes infeasible quickly. Maybe reverse engineering the font rendering by creating an exact replica of the source image? I trust some talented hacker will nail this in no time.
i also support the idea to check for pdf errors using a stream decoder.
How big is N though?
64
Asking the real questions
I am not intelligent enough to understand any of it but that was a fun read.
TIL the origin of Courier.
Long story short:
- Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
- The way attachments work in emails is that they're converted to encoded text.
- That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
- So it's theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.
Source: I'm a software developer and I'm currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
I'm a software developer and I'm currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
🫡
Godspeed friend
Are you having as much trouble with OCR as the article author? I would have thought OCR was a solved problem in 2026 even with poor font selection.
I'm not having trouble with it as such, it's just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it's ridiculously time-consuming.
OCR is mostly good enough. Problem here is we have 76 pages that we need to be read perfectly, with a low fidelity input
We also have very little in the way of error correction, since it's mostly not human readable
I wonder if they gave considered crowdsourcing this, having many people type in small chunks of the data by hand, doing their own character recognition? Get enough people in and enough overlap and the process would have some built-in error correction.
I mean the problem is that even with human eyes it's still really hard to tell l and 1 in that font.
Not an expert at all but I’m genuinely curious how long it would take to check all possibilities for each I or 1? Is that the full length of the hash or whatever? So in this example image we have 2^8 =256 different possibilities to check? Seems like that would be easy enough for a computer.
Edit: actually read the article. It’s much more complicated than this. This isn’t really the only issue and the base64 in the example was 76 pages long.
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There's an iOS game about the history of fonts you might enjoy. Struggling to find it at the moment, but you play a colon navigating through time, solving various puzzles.
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Interesting in few weeks we might end up with some additional unredacted documents
But knowing the sick fucks in these files, possible child-related content...
Has anyone checked if it's just black text on a black background. That would be in line with the competence level of Donnie's administration.
I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.
Some of the reactions are some in an effective way, and I assume this example is one of them. The problem being evidently they didn't think any what might be in big base64 blobs in the PDF, and I guess some of these folks somehow had their email encoded as PDF, which seems bonkers....
had their email encoded as PDF
Doesn't compute, please explain.
I guess the same way email can have html as an attachment for the same thing a plaintext does, evidently some of these mails suggested a mailer actually pdf encoded the email and attached, as well as the plain text.
So when someone replied with plaintext the base64 encoded PDF that they were replying to got 'quoted', meaning the unredacted email they were replying to is in there, just messy due to font confusion in the provided format.
Or did they just initially export the emails from Outlook as pdfs for the redaction process?
Ah, makes sense, thanks.
Some email programs did that, especially when there was special formatting involved. I seem to recall Thunderbird doing it in the past, as well as outlook.
Fun fact: this guy uses fish shell.
Hell yeah, fish is great
Sounds like he also maintains it
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I need an ELI5 version of this. (Note: this comment is a critique of me, not the author or the content of the article.)
Edit: if “nerdsnipe” isn’t in the dictionary, it totally should be.
Some of the Epstein emails were released as scanned PDFs of raw email format (See MIME)
MIME formatted emails are ASCII based. To include an attachments, which can be binary, the MIME format specifies it must be encoded using base64. Base64 can always take binary input and return an ASCII output. This is trivial to reverse if you have the ASCII output.
However, the font choice is inconvenient because l and 1 look the same.
I'm a bit confused by the article is only discussing extracting PDFs while in actuality you can reverse any attachment including images.
I am also no expert, so a smarter person will now correct me on anything I got wrong.
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