Heads-up: An update to this article has been posted. There have been a lot of complaints about both the competency and the logic behind the latest Epstein archive release by the DoJ: from censoring…
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.
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.
Its correct
Why the pdfs contain “wrong letters” though, i havent a clue
I think this is the origin: https://xkcd.com/356/