Comment by pimlottc

9 hours ago

Why not just try every permutation of (1,l)? Let’s see, 76 pages, approx 69 lines per page, say there’s one instance of [1l] per line, that’s only… uh… 2^5244 possibilities…

Hmm. Anyone got some spare CPU time?

It should be much easier than that. You should should be able to serially test if each edit decodes to a sane PDF structure, reducing the cost similar to how you can crack passwords when the server doesn't use a constant-time memcmp. Are PDFs typically compressed by default? If so that makes it even easier given built-in checksums. But it's just not something you can do by throwing data at existing tools. You'll need to build a testing harness with instrumentation deep in the bowels of the decoders. This kind of work is the polar opposite of what AI code generators or naive scripting can accomplish.

  • I wonder if you could leverage some of the fuzzing frameworks tools like Jepsen rely on. I’m sure there’s got to be one for PDF generation.

  • On the contrary, that kind of one-off tooling seems a great fit for AI. Just specify the desired inputs, outputs and behavior as accurately as possible.

Easy, just start a crypto currency (Epsteincoin?) based on solving these base64 scans and you'll have all the compute you could ever want just lining up