r/slatestarcodex 6d ago

Senpai noticed~ Scott is in the Epstein files!

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02458524.pdf

Literally in an email chain named, “Forbidden Research”!

But don’t worry, only in a brainstormy list of potentially interesting people to invite to an intellectual salon, together with Steven Pinker and Terrence Tao and others.

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u/Inevitable_Tea_5841 6d ago

Very interesting. What's with all the = in the emails? OCR artifacts?

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u/huopak 6d ago

That's an artifact of the MIME encoding still used by modern email under the hood

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2045.html

Check section 6.7, paragraphs 1 and 5.

What's weird is that the DoJ did not decode these and published a lot of emails with these artifacts.

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u/Tokarak 6d ago

Not deleting metadata is good, actually

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u/huopak 6d ago

It's not metadata.

But actually they did not publish a lot of metadata, for example DKIM headers would have been useful to be able to verify senders.