There's been many people reading the old

Epstein files that have been now

released by the government and it has us

asking a lot of questions. One of the

questions I wasn't prepared to hear was

this right here. Why are there so many

equal signs throughout these emails?

Like what the heck is going on? Why is

the spacing all goofy? Confidentials T

becomes an equal sign. Information's O

becomes an equal sign. The Y in property

becomes an equal sign. Why? Well,

there's a reason behind it. And the best

part is it might just be Microsoft's

fault. I've never been more excited.

This is just so good. Nothing but bugs

and viruses in the old Windows. Am I

right? All right. To understand why

there's these equal signs, the first

thing you need to understand is RFC

2045, which comes from November 1996.

The multi-purpose internet mail

extensions or mime. Yes, mime. You've

probably seen this if you've done any

developing, especially for the web.

You've seen this thing called mime type

floating around. Well, it's from this

RFC. This is the origins. Anyways, way

down inside this long RFC, there's

something called soft line breaks. The

quoted printable encoding requires that

encoded lines be no more than 76

characters long because those 80

character terminals, we do not want them

overflowing. Okay? Because we all use 80

character terminals, right? Right. So,

to get back to the equal sign,

effectively, you have a very long line

in email. Well, every 76 characters by

the RFC, we need to break it so that it

can be this beautiful quoted printable

character, right, to fit in these 80

column terminals. So, this one line, you

could imagine, could actually have to be

overflowed quite a few times before you

actually make it to the end. And how

they did the soft break is they would

insert an equal sign, a slash r, and a

slashn. That stands for carriage return

and line feed. Yes, printer terms. And

of course, the reason being, why do you

have slash RN/N? The common knowledge is

that back in the 70s and 80s, all these

different operating systems, they

weren't friends. Unix wanted to use SLN,

which is objectively correct. Mac, the

old classic map, wanted to use SLR. And

of course, MS DOS being the, you know,

unique one, it wanted SLR r/n, the old

registered nurse. And that's why all the

old internet protocols such as HTTP and

this one and many more all use the old

registered nurse for line separation.

Okay. So why is there equal sign? You're

still saying none of this actually

answers why there's equal signs. I mean

it's it's strange. Why do we do this?

Why do we put in these encoded

characters just to take them out? Well,

there's a lot of old hardware out there

running old software and if you don't

provide the right stuff, you could get

some bad email coming through. But

that's still it still does not explain

why why an equal sign and why even more

so more importantly is some of these

letters disappearing in favor of an

equal sign. So the first thing you need

to understand is a lot of these

documents were automatically processed

programmatically and a lot of that

programmatic happened on the old Windows

machine and a lot of the Windows machine

with text and binary mode file IO

happens to have an underlying method

called set mode and if you pass in the

right parameters to set mode carriage

return line feeds CRLFS the old

registered nurses that I was talking to

you about earlier those combinations are

translated into a single which is also

correct line feed character upon input.

So, Unix did win eventually. [laughter]

That means these programmatically

redacted and processed documents likely

got piped through and then they were

converted into this an equal sign/n

which then the t would be followed up

next. So, it' be equal sign.

Now, again, this does not answer the

question why oh why is the equal sign

still around? Well, there's this

excellent article called what's up with

all those equal sign anyways which goes

on and attempts to explain what was

going on. Now, it turns out this person

who had tons of experience in these old

line feed processing algorithms says a

lot of the decoders do a twopass

processing for emails. The first pass

goes on and looks for any of the

registered nurses and then just removes

those, joins the lines. Now they're back

to their original shape. The second pass

goes through and looks for an equal sign

and then a hex code. When encountering

the slash NT, it goes, I don't know what

to do. So, it does the only reasonable

fallback to do. Just remove these two

characters and leave the old equal sign

in intact. Yes, what a wonderful

fallback mechanism. Makes perfect. Like,

if I was a programmer, that's that's

what I would do. So, as you can see

right here, confidential. Wow. Oh my

gosh. Did you see the straightness of

that line? That was incredible. Okay, I

expect at least three comments

congratulating me on the pure

unadulterated smooth line I just wrote

right there. Anyways, confidential. You

can see exactly why what would happen

then. D E N. Oh my gosh, we got to put

in the old registered nurse with the

equal sign. Forgot that right there.

Confidential. All right, we got it. Oh

man, Windows processing. We go into the

equal sign, then the T. A crap. This is

just bad hex encoding. We leave that.

And what do we get after that? D E N

equal I A L, which is exactly what you

see here in the documents. These equal

signs. Apparently, people were on the

internet like, "Dude, this is this is

actually just another encoded signal. I

bet if we can decode all these equal

signs, we will figure out where Jeffrey

Epstein's been hiding all this time."

Okay, pizza gates real and Jeffrey

Epstein did not in fact kill himself.

He's off playing Fortnite. It's always

shocking to discover how much of our

life is is predicated based on some

weird '9s text processing algorithm. I

mean, it wasn't until just recently that

HTTP 1.1, which has origins back into

the 80s, was replaced by a more modern

binary encoding version of it, vastly

improving the processing of the

internet. It only took like 30ome years.

All right, I just wanted to yap about

that. It feels good. Okay, it's very,

very funny. And honestly, anytime I can

make fun of Microsoft, it just makes my

day. Oh man, Satia, we got you. But

honestly, just to be completely fair,

there was a small chance that the

Epstein files were in fact not on

somebody's desk. They are actually in a

uh version control system known as Git,

and they just happened to have auto CRLF

on, which will convert any CRLF into

just a LF, the old line feed. You know

what I'm talking about. Honestly,

classic debacle right there. The name

is, girl, let me show you my Microsoft

A gen. Hey, is that HTTP? Get that out

of here. That's not how we order coffee.

We order coffee via SSH terminal.shop.

Yeah. You want a real experience? You

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You don't know what SSH is?

>> Well, maybe the coffee is not for you.

Terminal coffee

in hand.

Living the dream.