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by anigbrowl6 hours ago |
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upvoteby tombrossman5 hours ago|
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GNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly.

  ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5))

  for pdf in "$@";
    do magick  -density 150 $pdf \
              -linear-stretch '1.5%x2%' \
              -rotate 0.4 \
              -attenuate '0.01' \
              +noise  Multiplicative \
              -colorspace 'gray' \
              "${pdf%.*}-fakescan.${pdf##*.}"
  done
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upvoteby barrkel3 hours ago|
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That seq is probably supposed to be $(seq 0.05 0.05 0.5). Right now it's always 0.05.

Note that you can get random numbers straight from bash with $RANDOM. It's 15 bit (0 to 32767) but good enough here; this would get between 0.05 and 0.5: $(printf "0.%.4d\n" $((500 + RANDOM % 4501)))

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upvoteby streetfighter644 hours ago|
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Shouldn't $ROTATION be set inside the loop and actually used in the magick command?
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upvoteby tombrossman3 hours ago|
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You know, now that you point it out that seems obvious. I think maybe I was experimenting with rotation and left that in, unused. I did this years ago. The loop works OK though. Thanks for the feedback (and now I have to finish editing that script ...)
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upvoteby streetfighter645 hours ago|
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Very interesting. That document in particular seems to be an interview of A. Acosta by the DoJ from 2019. But what reason would the FBI have for pretending it's a scanned document, if it is genuine? Perhaps there's some aspect of Epstein's deal with Acosta that they'd rather not reveal to the public?

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%207/EFTA000092...

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upvoteby juujian5 hours ago|
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Not that I can speak from personal experience or anything... But somebody on an email chain may have requested a scanned version of the document to ensure there is no metadata and the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document. There might even be a webtool available somewhere to do so, I wouldn't know...
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upvoteby mikkupikku5 hours ago|
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> the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document

Is that remotely plausible? I can't imaging faking a scan being easier than just walking down the hall to the copier room.

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upvoteby salynchnew3 hours ago|
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If it's already scanned, then you don't have to leave your desk.
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upvoteby meinersbur2 hours ago|
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The time advantage of faking a scan becomes better the more pages you have to scan.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

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upvoteby jojobas2 hours ago|
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It's thousands of pages, surely investing some time in a script is faster. They were in a rush as well.

If they were faking the documents rather than the delivery method they definitely could have invested some time in flawless looks.

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upvoteby smcnally2 hours ago|
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Or more-realistic flawed looks as the case is here.
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upvoteby ffsm84 hours ago|
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Depending on their technical capability, yes.

I mean even in this thread you got what are essentially one-liners to do it.

Definitely less hassle then doing it irl

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upvoteby mikkupikku2 hours ago|
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I know I'm not the brightest bulb by any measure, but do some people really take less than at least a few minutes to come up with one-liners for problems as novel as graphical transformations to PDFs? Maybe if the presumed techie hacker / federal worker took it as an amusing challenge I could see this being done, but genuinely out of pure laziness? That's incredible if true.
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upvoteby naniwaduni1 hours ago|
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It's not a novel problem. But yes, I don't think people quite appreciate how quick and easy it is for people who are in the habit of brewing up one-liners to solve simple problems to do that. I've done it here on HN for jq toy problems before, and I don't really doubt there are people similarly familiar with imagemagick.
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upvoteby streetfighter643 hours ago|
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Hoe big a percentage of FBI / DoJ employees are running linux (with imagemagick) as their work computer? I'd be surprised to see a similar oneliner for a stock windows installation.

Yeah they might have used some web converter, but that on the other hand would have been extremely incompetent handling of the secret data.

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upvoteby agopo4 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby ThePowerOfFuet3 hours ago|
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Straight to the signup page? A bit blatant, no?
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upvoteby draw_down5 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby hiccuphippo2 hours ago|
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I mean, I do that all the time when they ask me to print something, sign it, and then scan it.

Sign a blank paper, scan it, paste the original doc on it. Then keep the scan for future docs.

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