Yes, it’s base64. And what’s behind it could be anything that can be attached to an email.

In this case, it’s a PDF. If the base64 text can be extracted accurately, then the PDF that was attached to the email can be recreated.

The challenge is basically twofold:

1. There’s a lot of text, and it needs to be extracted perfectly. Even one character being wrong corrupts it and makes it impossible to decode.
2. As the article points out, there are lots of visual problems with the encoded text, including the shitty font it’s displayed with, which makes automating the extraction damn near impossible. OCR is very good these days, but this is kind of a perfect example of text that it has trouble with.

As for my approach, I’m basically just slowly and painstakingly running several OCR tools on small bits at a time, merging the resulting outputs, and doing my best to correct mistakes manually.

I’m not having trouble with it as such, it’s just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it’s ridiculously time-consuming.

Long story short:

• Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
• The way attachments work in emails is that they’re converted to encoded text.
• That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
• So it’s theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.

Source: I’m a software developer and I’m currently trying to recover one of these attachments.

Welcome! Isn’t it a breath of fresh air to use an OS that isn’t trying to turn your computer into an advertising and upselling platform? It has its issues, but it’s a huge relief to escape the constant inundation from Microsoft.

(Obligatory: I use arch BTW)

“Cognitive amplifier?” Bullshit. It demonstrably makes people who use it stupider and more prone to believing falsehoods.

I’m watching people in my industry (software development) who’ve bought into this crap forget how to code in real-time while they’re producing the shittiest garbage I’ve laid eyes on as a developer. And students who are using it in school aren’t learning, because ChatGPT is doing all their work - badly - for them. The smart ones are avoiding it like the blight on humanity that it is.