I'm impressed. You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. Even the little bits of humor look costly.
On the other hand, it's way more information than I expected. I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
> I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
Thanks! And it's a lot of info, yeah. ~90% of new data in yesterday's drop was photographs, which they redacted for us.
The House Oversight Committee's giant drop in November had tons of data we still didn't take advantage of even after doing the original Jmail, like flight logs.
For the Yahoo release, which is still ongoing, the folks at Drop Site News (see https://www.jmail.world/about) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.
while true, it would probably be useful to provide examples. The one that I am aware of seems to be a picture showing Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross with "redacted" victims
however it seems that this photo is actually taken from a 2003 Democratic fundraiser, and the redacted images of victims were of Diana Ross' son Evan, and Michael Jackson's kids, Paris and Prince Jackson. This may or may not be accurate either, since I have not been able to dig down into the photo and determine if it has any connections to a supposed 2003 fundraiser.
But it seems more likely to be true than not that this was sloppily planted evidence that was especially insultingly fake.
on edit: looking closer does not seem to be exact same photos, but instead two different photos taken at the same time and place, so in the 2003 Dem fundraising, but a different photo of that. So it could be that Epstein had it and DOJ thought hey, look at these pervs! Let's release!!
As you say, it's not the same photo. If the one in the dump was in Epstein's possession, the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton. I can't decide which I find more credible.
I think if it hadn't been those adults with the kids an alert staffer might have thought "whose kids are these, these aren't young teenage girls, I better double check" But Michael Jackson, kids, Clinton arms around him, Diana Ross with young male, they're thinking they walked into an armory filled with nothing but smoking guns!
I see people are not clued into this and incredulously downvote because the file release appears to be in good faith to them such that illegal evidence tampering is out of the question
I'm being snarky and this isn't such a serious comment and I don't really mean this for Gemini but can you imagine using something like Gemini ("Hi, please comb through this") and it just refuses on ethical grounds
> You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar.
I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, public health, and GMail what have the Romans ever done for us?
I mean it is so obvious causing me to find the use of the phrase cloned so weird that I feel it needs to be said.
The UI cloning doesn't feel exactly correct either there are things that are slightly off.
But I just find the "cloned" wrong, because obviously you cannot send an email from this account, you cannot log in to the service as Jeffrey Epstein, you cannot delete emails, create alerts based on searches, do actions on selected emails (create new tag, move under that tag)
there are so many functionalities that are not cloned because obviously they could not be cloned because they would make no sense for what this project is. So just the praise for cloning so quickly makes me sort of mad.
You could theoretically make something like this that allowed log in so you got a personalized epstein mails, and then could do all that, and perhaps get more mails sent in as files get released, and perhaps create Google alerts on epstein in the news etc. that would come as mails and maybe the code could put news that came in, into the appropriate the tags etc.
Out of curiosity, would you explain what you mean by that? Google was founded in 1998 and writing a mail client isn't terribly complicated. Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? Is Gmail older than Google?
A full featured mailed client is insanely complicated. If you think mail client is just smtp, you probably think word is just text with some styling and excel is just some cells and functions.
I’m sure, buried somewhere deep in Google systems, are vestiges of mail server code originally written in the 80s. But when people use the name Gmail, they are generally referring to the client facing web app, which does not have any such code.
If it exists, it's probably not at all related to Gmail or only used for testing. I don't think Google reuses a lot of third party code in its first party server software.
He wasn't sitting there writing binary code and implementing all 7 layers of the OSI stack by hand, he was was gluing together pre-existing components. And the pre-existing components he had access to include two major email startups acquired by Google in 2001 and 2003, which were founded in 1995 and 1997 respectively. (Although he does have at least two patents for features and algorithms he co-invented while making Gmail.)
> The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it.
no. google did not exist until the late 90s.
various forms of internet email sure did, but most popular mtas of the google era shared very little code with predecessors from the 80s and early 90s (maybe sendmail) and google almost certainly wrote their own from scratch.
but your first point. that an archive browser that looks like gmail is not equivalent to a full tilt email service backend is valid.
Maybe that and manipulating technical tools requires far less background knowledge than it did, meaning the definition of “technically inclined” has shifted, as it often does.
> - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
if only there were some kind of universal summary engine that never gets tired and is essentially free.
Anyone reading thru these and filtering out the promotion spam should consider taking a look thru. All his Amazon orders, which mostly are uninteresting sure, but scattered in there are books and eBook purchases dealing with some relevant and interesting-in-context topics.
Most of the Amazon orders look mundane, mostly books, what is weird is the quantity. It looks like it is all impulse purchases, and I guess that most of these will end up in the trash once it arrives, if it isn't picked up by someone else first.
I would have thought an quasi-billionaire like Epstein would have a personal concierge do the purchases for him. I certainly would if I was that rich. I would certainly not buy a shower head, I would show my concierge a picture of the shower I want and have him appoint a plumber so that I can have my shower the way I want it when I come back the next day. What's the point of being rich if that's to buy shower heads on Amazon?
You added icons and functionality to go to the beginning or end of search/inbox - Something that gmail just has never budged on having and always annoyed me! One of the first things I noticed. I must not be alone on this lol
Thank you! The night before launching the original Jmail we had this hunch that jump-straight-to-end and "random page" would make the site work for people.
Even just setting aside the criminal/salacious side... it is just so interesting to see the connections between the elite. Steve Bannon photographed chilling with Noam Chomsky, such a surprise. God, and Robert Trivers is in there too, eeh.
Bannon for a while was deeply ingrained in Hollywood. He still earns residuals on episodes of Seinfeld [0], and owns the film rights to Michael Lewis' Liars Poker (even supposedly writing a screenplay for it himself) [1].
As someone from the other side of the pond, I have to ask: what do people expect from all of this?
It feels like this is a big smoke screen used by the current admin, first to be reelected, and now to distract people from what they are actually doing (like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%, that they ended dozens of wars while dropping bombs daily all around the World...).
It also looks like it allows everyone to peek in other's people lives, which feels quite disturbing.
Sure, some of them were/are terrible people.
But there's also the victims here.
Furthermore, is it how justice should work?
Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?
Is there going to be some actual outcome? Both for the victims and for their offenders?
Or is it just a show where everyone can see them as detective/judge?
Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks.
And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
So I'm wondering: is it actual justice at work, or just a distraction while nothing change and nobody is actually held accountable?
> Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
Haha I was wondering where this other side of the pond was. This leaves no doubt. Quelle indignité.
For others: it's Sarkozy they are referring to, who was sentenced to 5 years of prison but spent only 20 days in it. He's free until his next trial. For having colluded with terrorists.
Sarkozy is out because in France you're free until proven guilty, unless you represent a risk to society or have a high risk of fleeing, neither apply to him, hence he's free until the final verdict
The other poster said sarkozy was sentenced to 5 years. How was that not the result of having been found guilty? I understand there are more trials to follow but do not see why that would free him.
They are being forced to release the files by a new law passed by congress. This is malicious compliance and they’re not actually releasing what they’re supposed to be releasing.
Rich people are hiding their crimes against children with corruption. This law seeks to reveal this corruption. Why is that wrong?
There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.
I suggest you post your e-mail login details and here and a dump of the contents of your phone, then all of HN can all check through and see what crimes you're guilty of.
I'm sure you'll say you haven't committed any crimes, but why should we be expected to believe you if you don't share all your information with the world?
When you sue someone, you can subpoena for evidence. Any evidence from that presented to the court is then public record. The police and criminal justice system doesn’t usually enforce privacy like that in criminal proceedings.
Are you trying to say that these documents shouldn’t be public because it violates someone’s right to privacy?
Epstein was running what he said was legal tax avoidance system for his clients.
I'm not saying they were breaking any laws in it, but Epstein is a dodgy guy (also he used to be involved in IIRC a Ponzi scheme and was previously sacked from a big firm - red flags galore with this guy) and the scheme worked off asset prices and trusts.
If a bunch of billionaires could manipulate asset prices (selling illiquid assets like mansions and artwork between each other and their trusts) I suspect they could really bring down their tax bills. This would be illegal (I think) but you'd need to untangle a large web of transactions to prove it.
It's interesting to see where the "too famous to prosecute" line lies. So far the highest profile casualty seems to have been Prince Andrew - as a result of the files, and NOT as a result of his actual court case with Virginia Giuffre, which he settled before her suicide.
Maybe it's possible. Berlusconi was brought down by his habit of young women eventually hitting one under 18.
When Berlusconi died, the current Italian government declared a national day of mourning broadcasted on national television. Never went to prison, convicted only 1 time for tax fraud, a lot of his quotes and videos are great source of memes that make the younger generations laugh (owning the Milan football helped him to be liked by younger people).
Please American people don't do the same mistakes as we did. It's like watching a remake (or a parody) of the same horror movie.
> after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite..
Yeah this is insightful. Another dictator went to jail in 1920s for staging a coup and used that time for writing his manifesto and getting sympathy from his followers. Some times (often these days) politics just lives on a plane outside the justice system. And it is really creepy.
> like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%
The NYT and other media outlets like to point out that this claim is mathematically impossible. However, “cut prices by 600%” is understood perfectly well by most people (but not pedants) to mean “we undid price hikes of 600%.”
I suspect that this phrasing was chosen as a “wedge” to drive home to the MAGA faithful that the news media is biased against them.
The victims themselves want the files to be released. Also, we all know how terrible politicians are, but the whole of public opinion should be made aware of how low the bar is.
Do you know Berlusconi, from the Italian government? He was the Italian version of Donald Trump, and he was involved in a lot of scandals at the time, including being involved with the mafia and, you guessed it, underage girls.
Yes I‘m also watching with disbelief. Even more so since media attention in the EU about it seems higher than in the US. Although the recent trove I found especially disturbing.
I recently watched a documentary where elites from beginning of the 20th century were also portrayed. Self-portrayed as Philanthropists. Moral bankruptcy became obvious, although in other manifestations such as shooting members of worker unions. And the US government did something in form of the New Deal, splitting monopolies and other policies.
In an optimistic scenario I’d expect something similar. New ways to hold elites accountable and keeping extreme differences in wealth in check.
I think for the duration of this four year term, at the very least, nothing will happen. But there's a bit of hope (possibly cope) that if these people accept an election loss in 2028 and voters keep this anger going, people involved may be charged and imprisoned.
History shows that it never happens in America and politicians always drop the "it's time for our nation to heal" line, but if the pendulum swings as far in the other direction as it did in the 2024 election, maybe things will be different. And the only hope of that happening is for people to stay pissed.
One thing I will say is the outrage about this has lasted longer than I initially imagined. America has had a lot of "this controversy won't be forgotten!" stuff that nobody remembers 2 months later. In contrast, I feel like this has been steadily ramping up and maintaining some degree of inertia for 2 years. Will it burn out by 2028? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. It was washed out of the news by trans people playing sports and that was somehow the biggest issue in the world. 2028 will undoubtedly have some weird "problem" that we can't yet imagine.
as history has proceeded these past 10 years, I am pretty confident american voters will have forgotten all about in 2028, assuming they still get to vote by then. Right now, I don't have faith in them to remember the purpose when they reach for the toilet paper roll,once they grab it :-/
Foreign governments running honeytrap operations on powerful perverts like bill clinton is common knowledge amongst anyone interested in knowing about such things, but some people think it is a super big secret that needs to be revealed to the masses. Thomas Massie for instance. I don’t think it’s antisemitism but I’m pretty sure it’s not because of a sudden concern for teenage prostitution, which is a big ongoing problem that could be addressed by legislators crafting policy if they weren’t so busy slinging mud at each other looking for Epstein photos with their political opponents.
I've had the same exact feeling for a while: several people known to be in the files are not the purest people we know and I'm not sure them being there will have any effect whatsoever. Taking Trump, what would really change to his image? All his supporters are already ok with the stuff he did/said and his opponents are already against him.
All his political/business allies won't easily switch as they stay his connections and money, not his clean image.
It just feels like a real-life reality show to keep the news flowing and people just enough bewildered and curious to keep coming back for more. Basically the perfect material for a while.
Especially with all the hyper redacted parts, groups can start literally reading between the lines and make unfounded allegations to create even more clicks.
The victims themselves were asking for the files to be fully released so that their abusers are held accountable. This was a big "fuck you" to the victims when everything of significance was [REDACTED]
This project is truly next level rather fascinating. Particularly intriguing is observing JEE's considerable interest regarding human intelligence and artificial intelligence, engaging in discussions on these matters with Chomsky and Marvin Minsky.
I participated on this project, but I'm not the main contributor. In fact, I'm working on running an ML model to get some nice gaussian splat visualizations of some of the relevant images based on the recent release by Apple's model: SHARP. It allows doing inference of a PLY point-cloud based on a single JPG image.
Hopefully I can merge some UI for it soon, but I'm away from my main computer right now.
EDIT: I'm going to text my friend Luke to comment and answer any questions about the project.
EDIT2: I am also happy to expand on the technical details of the project once I get a stable internet connection.
I'm one of the co-creators of Jmail alongside Riley Walz. We launched a Gmail-like view of Epstein's inbox last month. It got millions of page views, tons of really amazing requests to collaborate on making more related data accessible, and even new Yahoo emails that no one else has allowed the public to see.
Yesterday's DOJ drop resulted in this very spontaneous rag-tag team of friends coming to my place in SF and each making their own app in the "Jmail" Suite. Riley and I are pretty shocked by how versatile this parody style is for visualizing Epstein's 20 year digital footprint.
It's been a ton of fun and we're working hard to polish each view here.
Of course the perpetrators of child abuse would be adjacent to child abuse material. That's why the material needs to be indexed, to make sense of it and round up the rest of the perpetrators.
This is incredibly fascinating, not just because of who he was and the crimes he committed, but to see all this information on a specific person in one place is surreal.
This is incredible. How are you hosting all this? There's got to be considerable cost. Meanwhile, this is a genuinely great way to browse through all these files. Seriously impressive work.
A lot of the files are hosted on Cloudflare so their $0 egress cost helps a lot. Especially given that so many of the files can be considered immutable assets, so we can configure aggressive caching.
I know that Luke was working on stuff so as not to hit the database as much, but I was in the middle of a flight as that was happening so he'll have to come and provide more details.
The original site was on Railway and written in Pug! It crashed after Riley's tweet first went viral, then Riley did the heroic work of caching it all with Cloudflare after waking up to the site being down. After millions of unique visitors we racked up about $10 in costs.
This time we switched to Next.js 16 + Vercel, used Cloudflare R2 for asset hosting, and used Neon as the db. R2 has free egress, and Vercel + Next is cheap if cached correctly.
A special someone at Vercel gave us some tips on caching this one earlier today. We started by just using unstable_cache all over the place, and now we're migrating to ISR + full static pre-generation of as many pages as we can via generateStaticParams.
How complete is the material? I've seen "experts" in Swedish news paper DN claim so much is censored it looks like a cover up. Has that been your impression too?
1. DOJ (The White House's docs that they were required by law to drop yesterday plus many court documents, videos, and other docs from many news cycles this year)
2. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (the House Oversight Committee's releases. giant November drop that led to the original Jmail, then some photo drops this month)
3. Yahoo emails (originally sourced by DDoSecrets, then provided to us, redacted and verified by Drop Site News)
There is so much material in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT that never appears in DOJ, and vice versa. And then the Yahoo drop reveals even more new material. It feels like three odd slices of a giant dataset that keeps getting released.
re: people's complaints about yesterday's release having way too many redactions, I have no idea how much they over-redacted. I hear that they will release even more quite soon though.
Ah I was going to ask about the Yahoo emails.. are those distinct from the cloned Gmail messages or are they in the same inbox on your site?
Has anyone written a parser for the text messages? A messages-like UI to be able to read through all the texts would be super interesting too. The format DOJ released them in is impossible to follow.
Yes, it has been redacted far in excess of what the law allows, and the material is a tiny fraction of what the administration was required by law to release by this date
It doesn't belong into the Epstein Files, and doesn't need to be censored either, but the way it is framed in the DoJ release implies guilt where there is none.
How can you be sure the image wasn't part of the files collected during investigation? What makes you so sure Epstein didn't have the file saved somewhere on a device, server, or account that was collected?
I don’t think I expressed a particular opinion here, I just stated where the suspicion comes from.
That being said, I think we can demand a level of due diligence from public institutions that entails only censoring actual victims on actual pieces of evidence, instead of mindlessly placing black squares on the faces of news article pictures found on his computer. Nevermind that nobody can explain yet how this particular picture ended up in the grand jury files anyway.
That's not the exact same image, though. It's a separate image, from the same time and place. The one released may have been in Epstein's possession and therefore part of the files. Either some DoJ drone just redacted all children and non-celebrities due to procedure, or it was deliberately done in such a way as to make Clinton and Jackson look suspicious. Whatever the reason, this was not a Getty stock image planted in the files.
How can you post those emails and make a joke out of them - they have this footer that clearly states that if you are not a recipient you must delete the email immediately. Whole business world have this footer for a reason, for situations like this, so you can be sure your emails will not go public.
>i want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump.. virignia spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there
Most of the mails read like fake ones from a video game. Maybe it's because most of them were written by an older generation who uses more classic letter-style writing.
I understand the desire to make a suite of apps, and to create something cool for people to play with. Is your motivation to involve your creation with this topic specifically because you desire to expose people doing bad things, for the righteousness and morality of such?
Also, do you feel it's more important that the information simply "gets out there" than there exist a coherent set of theses addressing questions like: 1) what was the nature, scope and purpose of the hustle Epstein was fronting/running? 2) Who unequivocally did bad things related to this?
It's not an either or, but right now it appears the topic is data without conclusion.
I think it would be interesting to target an AI at all the data and have it devise a set of theses with support. My feeling is the topic remains in a state of "100% data, 0% conclusions" - which appears to be a way to sate public curiosity while avoiding consequence.
Yes, also many were PPM images (or encoded as such) in PDFs and then I used (cheap/light) multimodal LLMs to classify documents from photos. It was surprisingly cheap: <$1 for a few thousand PDFs / Images.
Oh my, I think that’s the most impressive work I’ve seen here on the HN. Very well done! I hope the public would explore the whole thing pretty quickly. Personally, I afraid they, the files, were highly tampered with, so obviously a lot could be hidden. Yet, still, that’s an achievement we have this opportunity to explore the whole thing, I guess. So this project is impressive in many ways. I enjoyed exploring the interface, can’t believe that’s just a clone, not a real Google product!
Michael Tracey, who influenced Hanania, has been on a wild crusade against all Epstein victims and has tried to discredit them.
He also avoids all intelligence connections. He never asks why Epstein got the job at Bear Stearns after leaving as a teacher at an expensive private school where William Barr's father was the headmaster.
He never publishes material like the officially released birthday book entry from Eliot Wolk, trader at Bear Stearns, who confirmed that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had an account at Bear Stearns and who teased Epstein about knowing teenage Ghislaine.
So it is now officially confirmed that Epstein knew Robert and Ghislaine much earlier than previously known. And that he knew Robert in the Iran Contra years where Robert was dealing with Adnan Khashoggi.
Tracey and Hanania are doing extremely poor journalistic work here by just focusing on the subset of Epstein victims that were over 18 and took money for the services.
Not reporting at all on the intelligence connections seems suspect as well.
"Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system."
Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible.
I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.
>> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
This flabbergasted me at first. Admittedly I had to refresh my memory that he died in jail awaiting trial, but he was still convicted once before that! The fact it was pre-MeToo should make it more damning, per his logic. I guess he’s saying there were no convictions after he became infamous, but there’s a caveat that he died awaiting trial, and that plus the prior conviction just makes this statement seem disingenuous or sloppy at best.
Everytime I watch these private jets and helicopters I wonder why flying economy class has to be so miserable in terms of horizontal, vertical, and leg space.
I saw, but the project has changed since then. There's now Google Photos, improvements to Drive, Jemini (LLM that can assist when understanding the files), and JFlights for flight tracking.
I sent an email to the hn email with more details!
> What I am saying is that women make bad choices [...] and later regret it
Yes, especially when those women are also children. One of the many reasons it's illegal to have sex with them and especially illegal to rent their bodies to your friends.
Transporting a minor for sex is illegal, regardless of whether they are considered of age in the jurisdiction they're being taken to.
But besides that, you're saying he ran a blackmail operation, which seems likely. If the girls he pimped out were of legal age, that's a lot less leverage to blackmail his targets with, isn't it?
So your claim is that someone is not a victim unless they are physically restrained or imprisoned? Can you give some examples of clear, definitive "legitimate victims" for contrast? Or are you insinuating that victim hood cannot be claimed unless they both come from the same income strata? Because otherwise the victims incentive to make money outweighs the possibility that the claim is true, that a wealthy person could in fact be a rapist?
Its cool to see the mail. I now think he did die absolutely.. i had a suspicion he didnt.. but him and chomsky are fucking retarded.. feels like scrolling through twitter for horrible handles trying to sound smart and just lil bitches.. It makes me happier that my work is not very smart, but compared to these guys we arent that bad. I mean he was a geopolitical analyst. he may have been book smart in some sense cause he ordered liebniz at some pont.. but also just sounded like he was super high (probably wasnt)... very surprsing..
On the other hand, it's way more information than I expected. I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
Jared kushner, is that you?
The House Oversight Committee's giant drop in November had tons of data we still didn't take advantage of even after doing the original Jmail, like flight logs.
For the Yahoo release, which is still ongoing, the folks at Drop Site News (see https://www.jmail.world/about) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.
For now we’re focusing on fixing the bugs because we’re already seeing an insane wave of traffic so most of us are focused on keeping the site alive.
Images removed from Epstein files less than a day after being posted - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-21/images-removed-from-e...
promises all the sleuthing excitement of chasing the significance of Donald in a Drawer.
https://www.imdb.com/news/ni65628031/
https://bsky.app/profile/meidastouch.com/post/3mag7myutmc2d
however it seems that this photo is actually taken from a 2003 Democratic fundraiser, and the redacted images of victims were of Diana Ross' son Evan, and Michael Jackson's kids, Paris and Prince Jackson. This may or may not be accurate either, since I have not been able to dig down into the photo and determine if it has any connections to a supposed 2003 fundraiser.
But it seems more likely to be true than not that this was sloppily planted evidence that was especially insultingly fake.
on edit: looking closer does not seem to be exact same photos, but instead two different photos taken at the same time and place, so in the 2003 Dem fundraising, but a different photo of that. So it could be that Epstein had it and DOJ thought hey, look at these pervs! Let's release!!
Similarly situation with Trump, for that matter.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341688
At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar.
I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.
The UI cloning doesn't feel exactly correct either there are things that are slightly off.
But I just find the "cloned" wrong, because obviously you cannot send an email from this account, you cannot log in to the service as Jeffrey Epstein, you cannot delete emails, create alerts based on searches, do actions on selected emails (create new tag, move under that tag)
there are so many functionalities that are not cloned because obviously they could not be cloned because they would make no sense for what this project is. So just the praise for cloning so quickly makes me sort of mad.
You could theoretically make something like this that allowed log in so you got a personalized epstein mails, and then could do all that, and perhaps get more mails sent in as files get released, and perhaps create Google alerts on epstein in the news etc. that would come as mails and maybe the code could put news that came in, into the appropriate the tags etc.
But until that time "cloned" is just very wrong.
I mean it has happened in other Google products...
Mails could even be in the trillions.
no. google did not exist until the late 90s.
various forms of internet email sure did, but most popular mtas of the google era shared very little code with predecessors from the 80s and early 90s (maybe sendmail) and google almost certainly wrote their own from scratch.
but your first point. that an archive browser that looks like gmail is not equivalent to a full tilt email service backend is valid.
Email as a technology is ancient by today’s standards. SMTP protocol got established in 1982. Even sendmail dates as far back as the ‘70s.
Another great article
Can you expand on this please? Really cool btw.
but they just copy the "UI" not the whole product
A job for an LLM…
if only there were some kind of universal summary engine that never gets tired and is essentially free.
Also, interesting that this one got by him (unopened, unread, filtered from inbox) and the timing of it being near his final arrest (coincidence, but still) https://www.jmail.world/eml/0b80588f551f3d097695f1c9507b6572
He sure bought a lot of books. I found this that is not a book.
https://www.jmail.world/search?q=lolita
2007 -> 2017:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/237057.Epstein_s_Library...
2018 -> 2019:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/237060.Epstein_s_Library...
You can only add 100 books in a Goodreads list so I had to create two. In the lists I linked back to the original Bloomberg article.
I would have thought an quasi-billionaire like Epstein would have a personal concierge do the purchases for him. I certainly would if I was that rich. I would certainly not buy a shower head, I would show my concierge a picture of the shower I want and have him appoint a plumber so that I can have my shower the way I want it when I come back the next day. What's the point of being rich if that's to buy shower heads on Amazon?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Media_and_investi...
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/steve-ba...
It feels like this is a big smoke screen used by the current admin, first to be reelected, and now to distract people from what they are actually doing (like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%, that they ended dozens of wars while dropping bombs daily all around the World...).
It also looks like it allows everyone to peek in other's people lives, which feels quite disturbing. Sure, some of them were/are terrible people. But there's also the victims here. Furthermore, is it how justice should work? Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?
Is there going to be some actual outcome? Both for the victims and for their offenders?
Or is it just a show where everyone can see them as detective/judge?
Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
So I'm wondering: is it actual justice at work, or just a distraction while nothing change and nobody is actually held accountable?
Haha I was wondering where this other side of the pond was. This leaves no doubt. Quelle indignité.
For others: it's Sarkozy they are referring to, who was sentenced to 5 years of prison but spent only 20 days in it. He's free until his next trial. For having colluded with terrorists.
Someone wrote in Le Monde, "it's like a man writing a feminist essay because he emptied the dish washer once", and that sums it up pretty well.
Rich people are hiding their crimes against children with corruption. This law seeks to reveal this corruption. Why is that wrong?
>Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?
What's the alternative to this? They don't share all the information with the world and we're expected to believe their evaluation of the evidence?
I suggest you post your e-mail login details and here and a dump of the contents of your phone, then all of HN can all check through and see what crimes you're guilty of.
I'm sure you'll say you haven't committed any crimes, but why should we be expected to believe you if you don't share all your information with the world?
Are you trying to say that these documents shouldn’t be public because it violates someone’s right to privacy?
Andrew Windsor needs to be extradited to the US and face trial.
We need a referendum about whether we want child rape to be a tool of US policy. I say no.
Reciprocity is a thing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
Epstein was running what he said was legal tax avoidance system for his clients.
I'm not saying they were breaking any laws in it, but Epstein is a dodgy guy (also he used to be involved in IIRC a Ponzi scheme and was previously sacked from a big firm - red flags galore with this guy) and the scheme worked off asset prices and trusts.
If a bunch of billionaires could manipulate asset prices (selling illiquid assets like mansions and artwork between each other and their trusts) I suspect they could really bring down their tax bills. This would be illegal (I think) but you'd need to untangle a large web of transactions to prove it.
Maybe it's possible. Berlusconi was brought down by his habit of young women eventually hitting one under 18.
Please American people don't do the same mistakes as we did. It's like watching a remake (or a parody) of the same horror movie.
Yeah this is insightful. Another dictator went to jail in 1920s for staging a coup and used that time for writing his manifesto and getting sympathy from his followers. Some times (often these days) politics just lives on a plane outside the justice system. And it is really creepy.
> like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%
The NYT and other media outlets like to point out that this claim is mathematically impossible. However, “cut prices by 600%” is understood perfectly well by most people (but not pedants) to mean “we undid price hikes of 600%.”
I suspect that this phrasing was chosen as a “wedge” to drive home to the MAGA faithful that the news media is biased against them.
Do you know Berlusconi, from the Italian government? He was the Italian version of Donald Trump, and he was involved in a lot of scandals at the time, including being involved with the mafia and, you guessed it, underage girls.
I recently watched a documentary where elites from beginning of the 20th century were also portrayed. Self-portrayed as Philanthropists. Moral bankruptcy became obvious, although in other manifestations such as shooting members of worker unions. And the US government did something in form of the New Deal, splitting monopolies and other policies.
In an optimistic scenario I’d expect something similar. New ways to hold elites accountable and keeping extreme differences in wealth in check.
History shows that it never happens in America and politicians always drop the "it's time for our nation to heal" line, but if the pendulum swings as far in the other direction as it did in the 2024 election, maybe things will be different. And the only hope of that happening is for people to stay pissed.
One thing I will say is the outrage about this has lasted longer than I initially imagined. America has had a lot of "this controversy won't be forgotten!" stuff that nobody remembers 2 months later. In contrast, I feel like this has been steadily ramping up and maintaining some degree of inertia for 2 years. Will it burn out by 2028? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. It was washed out of the news by trans people playing sports and that was somehow the biggest issue in the world. 2028 will undoubtedly have some weird "problem" that we can't yet imagine.
All his political/business allies won't easily switch as they stay his connections and money, not his clean image.
It just feels like a real-life reality show to keep the news flowing and people just enough bewildered and curious to keep coming back for more. Basically the perfect material for a while.
Especially with all the hyper redacted parts, groups can start literally reading between the lines and make unfounded allegations to create even more clicks.
Hopefully I can merge some UI for it soon, but I'm away from my main computer right now.
EDIT: I'm going to text my friend Luke to comment and answer any questions about the project.
EDIT2: I am also happy to expand on the technical details of the project once I get a stable internet connection.
I'm one of the co-creators of Jmail alongside Riley Walz. We launched a Gmail-like view of Epstein's inbox last month. It got millions of page views, tons of really amazing requests to collaborate on making more related data accessible, and even new Yahoo emails that no one else has allowed the public to see.
Yesterday's DOJ drop resulted in this very spontaneous rag-tag team of friends coming to my place in SF and each making their own app in the "Jmail" Suite. Riley and I are pretty shocked by how versatile this parody style is for visualizing Epstein's 20 year digital footprint.
It's been a ton of fun and we're working hard to polish each view here.
i can say that 90% of the work was in making sense of the data, indexing, processing, etc
You probably meant to use "in light of"
I know that Luke was working on stuff so as not to hit the database as much, but I was in the middle of a flight as that was happening so he'll have to come and provide more details.
The original site was on Railway and written in Pug! It crashed after Riley's tweet first went viral, then Riley did the heroic work of caching it all with Cloudflare after waking up to the site being down. After millions of unique visitors we racked up about $10 in costs.
This time we switched to Next.js 16 + Vercel, used Cloudflare R2 for asset hosting, and used Neon as the db. R2 has free egress, and Vercel + Next is cheap if cached correctly.
A special someone at Vercel gave us some tips on caching this one earlier today. We started by just using unstable_cache all over the place, and now we're migrating to ISR + full static pre-generation of as many pages as we can via generateStaticParams.
1. DOJ (The White House's docs that they were required by law to drop yesterday plus many court documents, videos, and other docs from many news cycles this year)
2. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (the House Oversight Committee's releases. giant November drop that led to the original Jmail, then some photo drops this month)
3. Yahoo emails (originally sourced by DDoSecrets, then provided to us, redacted and verified by Drop Site News)
There is so much material in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT that never appears in DOJ, and vice versa. And then the Yahoo drop reveals even more new material. It feels like three odd slices of a giant dataset that keeps getting released.
re: people's complaints about yesterday's release having way too many redactions, I have no idea how much they over-redacted. I hear that they will release even more quite soon though.
Has anyone written a parser for the text messages? A messages-like UI to be able to read through all the texts would be super interesting too. The format DOJ released them in is impossible to follow.
Do you have a page about each dataset you're sourcing and the background on them like your provide here?
The "EFTA00000468" saga has me distrusting the authenticity of most of these datasets.
It doesn't belong into the Epstein Files, and doesn't need to be censored either, but the way it is framed in the DoJ release implies guilt where there is none.
That being said, I think we can demand a level of due diligence from public institutions that entails only censoring actual victims on actual pieces of evidence, instead of mindlessly placing black squares on the faces of news article pictures found on his computer. Nevermind that nobody can explain yet how this particular picture ended up in the grand jury files anyway.
who planted them?
Here's at least one notable image.
(lot of bad quality ones though)
>i want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump.. virignia spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there
Hooo boy
are you talking about OpenGraph metadata or something else that we can fix?
Most of the mails read like fake ones from a video game. Maybe it's because most of them were written by an older generation who uses more classic letter-style writing.
- JPhotos: https://www.jmail.world/photos
- JDrive: https://www.jmail.world/drive
- JAmazon: https://www.jmail.world/jamazon
Also, do you feel it's more important that the information simply "gets out there" than there exist a coherent set of theses addressing questions like: 1) what was the nature, scope and purpose of the hustle Epstein was fronting/running? 2) Who unequivocally did bad things related to this?
It's not an either or, but right now it appears the topic is data without conclusion.
I think it would be interesting to target an AI at all the data and have it devise a set of theses with support. My feeling is the topic remains in a state of "100% data, 0% conclusions" - which appears to be a way to sate public curiosity while avoiding consequence.
We are working on better embeddings including image embeddings.
"We compiled these Epstein estate emails from the House Oversight Committee release by converting the PDFs to structured text with an LLM"
and:
"Data Sources
TechnologyDocument parsing and extraction powered by reducto"
You could make a spinoff after this Epstein wave is gone: Use the front end to build a commercially viable product! :-)
Thanks for the ton of work!
Nice using self-emails as a knowledge base.
One suggestion: please add previous/next navigation on the images, so that one doesnt have to open an image, close, open again.
I would have put the “release” part in scare quotes as anything important has been redacted.
He also ordered like 9 pairs of Crocs. He really liked the fuzzy lined Crocs: https://www.jmail.world/search?q=Crocs
we should bugfix
which url did you do that?
can you help repro?
What an uninteresting media obsession as far as news stories go.
He also avoids all intelligence connections. He never asks why Epstein got the job at Bear Stearns after leaving as a teacher at an expensive private school where William Barr's father was the headmaster.
He never publishes material like the officially released birthday book entry from Eliot Wolk, trader at Bear Stearns, who confirmed that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had an account at Bear Stearns and who teased Epstein about knowing teenage Ghislaine.
So it is now officially confirmed that Epstein knew Robert and Ghislaine much earlier than previously known. And that he knew Robert in the Iran Contra years where Robert was dealing with Adnan Khashoggi.
Tracey and Hanania are doing extremely poor journalistic work here by just focusing on the subset of Epstein victims that were over 18 and took money for the services.
Not reporting at all on the intelligence connections seems suspect as well.
Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible.
I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.
This flabbergasted me at first. Admittedly I had to refresh my memory that he died in jail awaiting trial, but he was still convicted once before that! The fact it was pre-MeToo should make it more damning, per his logic. I guess he’s saying there were no convictions after he became infamous, but there’s a caveat that he died awaiting trial, and that plus the prior conviction just makes this statement seem disingenuous or sloppy at best.
P.S. feel like a private eye perusing the Amazon purchases. Nabokov and Nietzsche, oh my.
https://hnrankings.info/46339600/
https://hnrankings.info/46004118/
I sent an email to the hn email with more details!
Also since that post we worked with Drop Site News + DDoSecrets to post new Yahoo emails that no one has let the public see yet.
Yes, especially when those women are also children. One of the many reasons it's illegal to have sex with them and especially illegal to rent their bodies to your friends.
But besides that, you're saying he ran a blackmail operation, which seems likely. If the girls he pimped out were of legal age, that's a lot less leverage to blackmail his targets with, isn't it?
read rest of the thread with more context on why