Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments (opens in new tab)

She's a medical doctor, who became amnesic when on the stand for Maxwell's case

>Pressed about gaps in her memory, Dubin told the court: "It's very hard for me to remember anything far back and sometimes I can't remember things from last month. My family notices it. I notice it."

Xerox would like a word.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815

Point being, "correcting" to "correct looking" may be worse than just accepting errors. Errors are often clearly identified by humans as a nonsense word. "Correcting" OCR can result in plausible, but wrong results that are more difficult for the human in the loop to identify.

Also look up double/triple data-entry systems, where you have multiple people enter the data and then flag and resolve differences. Won't protect you from your staff banding together to fuck you over with maliciously bad data, but it's incredibly effective to ensure people were Actually Working Their Blocks under healthy circumstances.

For example, when the Mueller reports were released with redactions, they had no searchable text or meta data because they were worried about these exact kind of data leaks.

However, vast troves of unsearchable text is not a huge win for transparency.

PDFs are just a garbage format and even good administrations struggle.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02702...

Someone who made some progress on one Base64 attachment got some XMP metadata that suggested a photo from an iPhone. Now I don't know if that photo was itself embedded in a PDF, but perhaps getting at least the first few hundred bytes decoded (even if it had to be done manually) would hint at the file-type of the attachment. Then you could run your tests for file fidelity.

that's pointed out in the article. It's easy for plaintext sections, but not for compressed sections. Didn't notice any mention of checksums.

If I was Pam? I wouldn't have been.

If she was me, start earlier, hire better, end later.

More likely it's just an oversight, but it could also be CYA for dragging their feet, like "you rushed us, and look at these victims you've retraumatized". There are software solutions to find nudity and they're quite effective.

The search on the DOJ website (which we shouldn't trust), given the query: "Content-Type: application/pdf; name=", yields maybe a half dozen or so similarly printed BASE64 attachments.

There's probably lots of images as well attached in the same way (probably mostly junk). I deleted all my archived copies recently once I learned about how not-quite-redacted they were. I will leave that exercise to someone else.

Wonder why there's so many random case files in the files.