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.
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?
Asking the real questions
Since there’s 78 pages, I’m guessing at least 1 ambiguity per page? Anyways, it’s dreadfully big.
2^78 is large but computers can do an awful lot per second, so if only about some the pages contain attachments 2^40-55 is something you could bruteforce in weeks if you can do millions of attempts a second
I have never looked into the details of an OCR, but if it’s a classifier it should give the it’s confidence in being a 1 or L so you can start with the low confidence characters.
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.
Ah, makes sense, thanks.
Or did they just initially export the emails from Outlook as pdfs for the redaction process?
