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?

Nothing about this is specific to GNOME, right? Imagemagick is cross-platform

I like https://lookscanned.io/

[flagged]

A simpler explanation could be wanting to skip the print->sign->scan ceremony required by some institutions.

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.

This. Slip in a few thousand “fakes” with the trove of goods to be able to fabricate a narrative.

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...

I am only guessing that they had to remove the document from a classified network in a way where data won't possibly leak

[dead]

Vastly easier when you do it to one or a handful of documents.

But if you want to do it to 2000 documents...

[dead]

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.

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)

>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?

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.

> 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.

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?

If you have a large enough set to test against and a specific person you are looking for, this is totally doable currently.

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).

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.

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

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.

That is a crazy amount of emails from/about moot...

Created /pol/ for epstein himself https://bsky.app/profile/kaiserbeamz.bsky.social/post/3mdou7...

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.

What interest would Reddit have in suppressing the backup of official, public, government document releases?

That's my understanding too, so archiving the unredacted images could mean holding CSAM.

If we're assuming they didn't leave victims unredacted on purpose

Thanks a lot!

He explained the newline thing that confused me. Good read!

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?

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.)

How could that be possible? Isn't JPEG a fairly straightforward container for JFIF+metadata?

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.

It would be funny (and disturbing) to add Jemini to JMail.

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.

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.

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... ?)

You’ve sidestepped the important part of the question.

Who determines who deserves privacy, and how do they determine it?

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*"

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.