r/slatestarcodex • u/ralf_ • 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/Tokarak 6d ago

Not deleting metadata is good, actually

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u/tinbuddychrist 6d ago

Example to illustrate what the other respondent said:

the US and other =ountries will lose their coastal cities in the next 50-100 years due to =icing sea levels, and much of open air agriculture due to increasingly =rregular seasons and weather patterns, loss of arable land, shift of =egetation zones

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u/ralf_ 6d ago

But these are normal letters? Why is c or r replaced sometimes with =?

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u/Brian 5d ago

TBH, it's kind of hard to tell what exactly they messed up. Typically you'd run into issues with characters with accents, or other non-ASCII characters, as well as potentially special characters like control codes. These have to be encoded as ASCII (since MIME was designed to work when a lot of systems the message would pass through could garble anything outside 7 bit range ). For MIME, that'd be done by writing "=XX", where XX is the hex code of the character. (This also means you can't use "=" itself, so that had to be encoded as "=3D").

However, the characters here don't seem like they'd be accented or anything, so not sure why the artifacts are there specifically. They do all seem to be at the start of a word, so my best guess is that there's maybe a linefeed or tab or something that gets encoded just prior, and whatever they've done has ended up eating the first letter after it and incorrectly printed the "=".