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by goodSteveramos 1152 days ago
>The cExtractor tool being provided to contest participants after the contest didn't help Lindell in the panel's view because "the data at issue is the data provided to contestants as part of the Contest, not some data in hundreds of files informally provided later."

thats like saying a zip file must not contain any data because it didnt come with a copy of the unzip program.

the underlying arguments for this judgement are just as nonsensical as the contest
3 comments
commoner 1152 days ago
No, even when the files are processed through cExtractor, the resulting data would not be considered "election data". The arbitration ruling looks sound to me.

> One of the contest judges testified that the binary data would yield a spreadsheet similar to the other one analyzed during the contest. But "without column headings, we have already concluded that such a spreadsheet does not meet the definition of election data," the panel wrote.

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robert-graham 1151 days ago
Hi. I was at the Cybersymposium. The cExtractor tool was provided to us during the Cybersymposium, not after. A lot more files were provided than this person claims to have received.

I don't understand the panel's reasoning either. Nobody knows all that these .bin files contain. There's no evidence they are from the 2020 election, but no evidence they aren't. I didn't enter the contest because I thought the rule were rigged, that nobody could prove what these files don't contain.

They look like either randomly generated or encrypted data, within which ever couple megabytes a line of text has been inserted. The line of text is ROT3, which may be what Dr. Frank refers to as a "test" to see if people know what they are doing.

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im3w1l 1152 days ago
What is cExtractor anyway? I'm not able to find anything that fits. Just https://github.com/JustCallMeSimon26/CExtractor
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robert-graham 1151 days ago
It was a program written by Dennis Montgomery in dot-net/C++ provided to Mike Lindell along with the .bin files that Montgomery claims to contain pcaps.

It simply scans files looking for strings, and outputs those strings.

Montgomery's code is incomprehesible and weird, so I wrote my own extract program in C. https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/blxtract

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