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What's up with all those equals signs anyway?
- lordnacho 9mo agoI love how HN always floats up the answers to questions that were in my mind, without occupying my mind. I, too, was reading about the new Epstein files, wondering what text artifact was causing things to look like that.
- AlphaAndOmega0 9mo agoSame here. I did notice what I think was an actual error on someone's part, there was a chart in the files comparing black to white IQ distributions, and well, just look at it: https://nitter.net/AFpost/status/2017415163763429779?s=201 https://nitter.net/AFpost/status/2017415163763429779?s=201 Something clearly went wrong in the process.
- fredley 9mo agoMe too. I first assumced it was an OCR error, then remembered they were emails and wouldn't need to go through OCR. Then I thought that the US Government is exactly the kind of place to print out millions of emails only to scan them back in again. I'm glad to know the real reason!
- rireads 9mo agoI just want to add that I would expect the exact same thing from the German government. Glad to see we're not all that different
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jojomodding 9mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260203094902/https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/02/02/whats-up-with-all-those-equals-signs-anyway/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260203094902/https://lars.inge... Did the site get the HN kiss of death?
- seydor 9mo agoTLDR "=\r\n" was converted to "=\n"
- netsharc 9mo agoAuthor seems to think Unix uses a character called "NL" instead of "LF"...
- db_admin 9mo agoI am more surprised by the description of “rock döts”. A Norwegian certainly knows that ASCII is not enough for all our alphabetical needs.
- topaz0 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut The writer presumably knows that umlauts and other non-ascii characters are functional in many languages. "rock döts" is poking fun at the trend in a certain tranche of anglophone rock/metal to use them in a purely aesthetic way in band names etc.
- debugnik 9mo agoUnicode labels U+000A as all of "LINE FEED (LF)", "new line (NL)" and "end of line (EOL)". I'm guessing different names were imported from slightly different character sets, although I understand the all-uppercase name to be the main/official one. https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf
- netsharc 9mo agoOh okay... for a technical article, referrring to 0A with two different names within the same sentence of each other is not confusing at all... /S Geezus...
- matsemann 9mo agoNL, or New Line, is a character in some character sets, like old mainframe computers. No need to be snarky just because he mistyped or uses a different name for something.
- quibono 9mo agoCLRF vs LF strikes again. Partly at least. I wonder why even have a max line length limit in the first place? I.e. is this for a technical reason or just display related?
- dgan 9mo agoI am just wondering how it is good idea for a sever to insert some characters into user's input. If a collegue were to propose this, i d laugh in his face It's just sp hacky i cant belive it's a real life's solution
- flexagoon 9mo agoWhen you post a comment on HN, the server inserts HTML tags into your input. Isn't that essentially the same thing?
- dgan 9mo agoNo, because there is a clear separation between the content and the envelop. You wouldnt expect the post office to open your physical letters and write routing instructions to the postmen for delivery But I agree with sibling comment: it makes more sense when its called "encoding" instead of "inserting chars into original stream"
- 1718627440 9mo ago> You wouldnt expect the post office to open your physical letters and write routing instructions to the postmen for delivery Digital communication is based on the postmen reading, transcribing and copying your letters. There is a reason why digital communication is treated differently then letters by the law and why the legally mandated secrecy for letters doesn't apply to emails.
- jagged-chisel 9mo ago“Insert characters”? Consider converting the original text (maintaining the author’s original line wrapping and indentation) to base64. Has anything been “inserted” into the text? I would suggest not. It has been encoded. Now consider an encoding that leaves most of the text readable, translates some things based on a line length limit, and some other things based on transport limitations (e.g. passing through 7-bit systems.) As long as one follows the correct decoding rules, the original will remain intact - nothing “inserted.” The problem is someone just knowledgeable enough to be aware that email is human readable but not aware of the proper decoding has attempted to “clean up” the email for sharing.
- beejiu 9mo ago> So what’s happened here? Well, whoever collected these emails first converted from CRLF (i.e., “Windows” line ending coding) to “NL” (i.e., “Unix” line ending coding). This is pretty normal if you want to deal with email. But you then have one byte fewer: I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail, but isn't it possible that Epstein was syncing emails from Gmail to a third party mail server? Since the Stackoverflow post details the exact situation in 2011, I think we should be open to the idea that we're seeing data collected from a secondary mail server, not Gmail directly. Do we have anything to discount this? (If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also see the "=" issue simply by applying the Quoted-Printable encoding twice, not just by mishandling the line-endings, which also makes me think two mail servers. It also explains why the "=" symbol is retained.)
- MoltenMan 9mo agoThis seems like the most likely reason to me!
- TazeTSchnitzel 9mo agoIn one of the email PDFs I saw an XML plist with some metadata that looked like it was from Apple's Mail.app, so these might be extracted from whatever internal format that uses.
- ErigmolCt 9mo agoYeah, I wouldn't bet on this being a single bad Gmail export; it smells much more like the accumulated scars of multiple mail systems doing "helpful" things to the same messages over time
- flomo 9mo agoWhen they process these emails, it's fairly common to import everything into a MS Outlook PST file (using whatever buggy tool). That's probably why these look like Outlook printouts even though its Yahoo mail or etc.
- topspin 9mo agoWhat happened here is what always happens with all printed and digital material that goes through some evidentiary process. The shot-callers demand the material, which is a task fobbed off onto some nobody intern who doesn't matter (deliberately, because the lawyers and career LEOs don't want any "officer of the court" or other "party" to put eyes on things they might need to deny knowing about later.) They use only the most primitive, mechanical method possible, with little to no discretion. The collected mass of mangled junk is then shipped to whoever, either in boxes or on CD-ROM/DVD (yes, still) or something. Then, the reverse process is done, equally badly, again by low-level staff, also with zero discretion and little to no technical knowledge or ability, for exactly the same reasons, to get the material into some form suitable for filing or whatever. Through all of this, the subtle details of data formats and encodings are utterly lost, and the legal archive fills with mangled garbage like raw quoted-printable emails. The parties involved have other priorities, such as minimizing the number of people involved in the process, and tight control over the number of copies created. Their instinct is not to bring in a bunch of clever folk that might make the work product come out better, because "better" for them is different than "better" for Twitter or Facebook. Also, these disclosures are inevitably and invariably challenged by time: the obligation to provide one thing or another is fought to the last possible minute, and when the word does finally go out there is next to no time to piddle around with details. In the Epstein case, the disclosures were done years ago, the original source material (computers, accounts, file systems, etc.) have all long since been (deliberately) destroyed, and what the feds have is the shrapnel we see today.
- tiborsaas 9mo ago> We see that that’s a quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that Why do mail server care about how long a line is? Why don't they just let the client reading the mail worry about wrapping the lines?
- thephyber 9mo agoThe simplest reason: Mail servers have long had features which will send the mail client a substring of the text content without transferring the entire thing. Like the GMail inbox view, before you open any one message. I suspect this is relevant because Quoted Printable was only a useful encoding for MIME types like text and HTML (the human readable email body), not binary (eg. Attachments, images, videos). Mail servers (if they want) can effectively treat the binary types as an opaque blob, while the text types can be read for more efficient transfer of message listings to the client.
- Pinus 9mo agoAs far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some server somewhere running on some ancient IBM hardware using EBCDIC encoding and truncating everything to 72 characters because its model of the world was based on punched cards. So standards were written to handle all those bizarre systems. And I am sure that there is someone on HN who actually used one of those servers...
- brador 9mo agoCould be worsened by inaccurate optical character recognition in some cases. Back in those days optical scanners were still used.
- ccppurcell 9mo agoRock dots? You mean diacritics? Yeah someone invented them: the ancient Greeks, idiöt.
- RHSeeger 9mo agoIt's not the character, its the way / context in which it's used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut
- ccppurcell 9mo agoI know what he was referring to. But the use case is obviously languages other than English, not the Motörhead fan club newsletter.
- chr 9mo agoYeah, that dude oughta read books and learn about computers, too.
- gerikson 9mo agoAnd live in a country where they use these in their alphabets.
- topaz0 9mo agoSome combination of people misunderstood some other people's joke, not totally clear which and which.
- noduerme 9mo agoGreat. Can't wait for equal signs to be the next (((whatever this is))). Maybe it's a secret code. j/k On a side note: There are actually products marketed as kosher bacon (it's usually beef or turkey). And secular Jews frequently make jokes like this about our kosher bros who aren't allowed to eat the real stuff for some dumb reason like it has too many toes.
- rsynnott 9mo agoBut... pigs _do_ have cloven hooves! The issue is that they're not ruminant. That said, there is a _possibly_ kosher pig: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babirusa#Relationship_with_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babirusa#Relationship_with_hum...
- LAC-Tech 9mo agoGreat. Can't wait for equal signs to be the next (((whatever this is))). Maybe it's a secret code. j/k Yeah clearly you guys are the biggest victims in all this... get in there and make it about you!
- heikkilevanto 9mo agoI thought the article would be about the various meanings of operators like = == === .=. <== ==> <<== ==>> (==) => =~=
- direwolf20 9mo agoWhat is this, a Haskell for ants?
- ErigmolCt 9mo agoThis ended up being way more interesting
- ruhith 9mo ago[dead]
- V__ 9mo agoThey have top men working on it right now.
- lvncelot 9mo ago> It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't I'm sure you already know this one, but for anyone else reading this I can share my favourite StackOverflow answer of all time: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
- josefx 9mo agoI prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.
- kapep 9mo agoThe regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.
- bobince 9mo agoOf all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.
- zabzonk 9mo agoPeople posting Excel formulae?
- lucb1e 9mo agocat title | sed 's/anyway/in email/' would save a click for those already familiar with =20 etc.
- voxelghost 9mo agoMy main takeaway from this article, is that I want to know what happened to the modified pigs with non-cloven hoofs
- thedanbob 9mo agoI wrote my own email archiving software. The hardest part was dealing with all the weird edge cases in my 20+ year collection of .eml files. For being so simple conceptually, email is surprisingly complicated.
- stevekemp 9mo agoI wrote a console-based mail client, which was 25% C++ and 75% Lua for defining the UI and the processing. It never got too popular, but I had users for a few years and I can honestly say MIME was the bane of my life for most of those years.
- thedanbob 9mo agoIndeed. A big chunk of my email parser deals with missing or incorrect content headers. Most of the rest attempts to sensibly interpret the infinite combinations of parts found in multipart (and single-part!) emails.
- jandrese 9mo agoEmail is one of those cursed standards where the committee wasn't building a protocol from scratch, but rather trying to build a universal standard by gluing together all of the independently developed existing systems in some way that might allow them to interoperate. Verifying that a string a user has typed is a valid email address is close to impossible short of just throwing up your hands and allowing anything with a @ somewhere in it.
- btown 9mo agoEmail is one of the very few success cases of the xkcd Standards meme: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ - and it's due to practicality and ingenuity on the part of people who made very creative parsers and placed real-world understanding behind every word of the early RFCs. Without a unified email standard, the world would look incredibly different today, especially as it bootstrapped open communication between different countries and institutions in developing every protocol since.
- xg15 9mo agoI'm just wondering why this problem shows up now. Why do lots of people suddenly post their old emails with a defective QP decoder? > For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is? Edit: Question answered.
- SCdF 9mo agoPresumably the Epstein files, but I'm not on twitter so not sure
- xg15 9mo agoOoh, that reason. Sorry for having been dense. Thanks!
- grimgrin 9mo agoyou presume cor=rect https://www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA02512824?view=person https://www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA02512824?view=person
- xg15 9mo agoHuh, Noam Chomsky, nice one!
- mxfh 9mo agoYet somehow there is always a version of the same thread that's not mangled https://www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA02512795?view=inbox https://www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA02512795?view=inbox Can only assume DOJ overpaid the law firms like 5x by not specifying deliveries need to be deduplicated first.
- avemg 9mo agoJeff Epstein? The New York financier?
- ropp 9mo ago
- maartin0 9mo agoFun how the archive.today article near the top has this exact issue https://pastes.io/correspond https://pastes.io/correspond https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805
- MarginalGainz 9mo ago"It’s a fascinating case of 'Abstraction Leak'. We’ve become so accustomed to modern libraries handling encoding transparently that when raw data surfaces (like in these dumps), we often lack the 'Digital Archeology' skills to recognize basic Quoted-Printable. These artifacts (=20, =3D) are effectively fossils of the transport layer. It’s a stark reminder that underneath our modern AI/React/JSON world, the internet is still largely held together by 7-bit ASCII constraints and protocols from the 1980s.
- VoodooJuJu 9mo ago[dead]
- JKCalhoun 9mo ago(The title of the blog reminded me the late Bob Pease [1] who had the signature, "What's all this XXX stuff, anyhow?" [2] where XXX might be "noise gain", "capacitor leakage"…) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease [2] https://www.qsl.net/n9zia/pease/index.html https://www.qsl.net/n9zia/pease/index.html
- ValveFan6969 9mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 9mo agoThe most interesting thing to me wasn't the equals signs, which I knew are from quoted-printable, but the fact that when an equals sign appears, a letter that should have been preceding or following it is missing. It's as if an off-by-one error has occurred, where instead of getting rid of the equals sign, it's gotten rid of part of the actual text. Perhaps the CRLF/LF thing is part of it.
- kstrauser 9mo agoFor context, this is the Lars Ingebrigtsen who wrote the manual for Gnus[0], a common Emacs package for reading email and Usenet. It’s clever, funny, and wildly informative. Lars has probably forgotten more about email parsing than 99% of us here will ever have learned. The manual itself says[1]: > Often when I read the manual, I think that we should take a collection up to have Lars psycho-analysed. 0: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/gnus.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/gnus.htm... 1: https://www.gnus.org/manual.html https://www.gnus.org/manual.html
- sovande 9mo agoNot only the manual, but Gnus itself. I remember this guy from the university (UiO) when he started working on Gnus. He was a small celebrity among us informatics students, and we all used Emacs and Gnus, of course.
- kstrauser 9mo agoI'd forgotten that! Yeah, I believe Lars also wrote a huge chunk of the current Gnus. I stopped using it a while back and maybe someone else came along and rewrote it again, replacing all his code, but I don't think that's the case. Gnus was absolutely delightful back in the day. I moved on around the time I had to start writing non-plaintext emails for work reasons. It's also handy to be using the same general email apps and systems as 99.99% of the rest of the world. I still have a soft spot in my heart for it. PS: Also, I have no idea whatsoever why someone would downvote you for that. Weird.
- rurban 9mo agoAlso gmane. The once popular mailing lists search site.
- jd3 9mo agoI discovered X-Face[0] through gmane! Such a blast from the past. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face
- ErigmolCt 9mo agoWhat's funny is that the failure mode here is so quietly destructive
- Hanzklatil369 9mo ago27b09b80f93cecf1-000000001b5e2c7f-0000000069825928
- cachius 9mo agoI'd like a good .eml viewer that undoes the quoted printable transformation for the contained plain and html text. useful for mails downloaded from Outlook.
- anthk 9mo agoDear GNU's: rewrite the fetching core so it gets performant enough to not crawl under 10000 headers from either usenet or Email. No, even native compilation is fast enough.