According to him it will only be released if he is killed or imprisoned.

The US government will not rest until they know what he knows AND that document is defused.

Evidence that dick cheney* new more about the events about to transpire on 9/11/01 than did just about anyone else, including most of the highjackers? Evidence that during cheney's* secret energy meetings, it was revealed that the US would be invading Iraq over a year before the invasion?

Just speculation....

according to reports.

Again: Hit that button, Bay-bee!

Yoko Ono's recipe for Chicken Vindaloo.

Remember those days, when a 40 Gig hard drive was the latest?

I still have sheets of the "16" apple stickers you put on the 5 1/4" floppies. It was NOT an easy upgrade. The first "hard drive" I installed was a 5MB Corvus networked drive (required a dedicated Apple II as the server) that weighed about 40 lbs. It used a parallel cable. I was amazed when they came out with (forget the brand, started with an "N&quot 30MB drive that was the size of a Honda (just kidding, it was about the size of a microwave oven). Well, fuck. So is a Honda.

Still, I've got a bank of drives, at least 20 in sight, that are between 800GB and 1.5TB in size. Things change with times. And I have an AOL 2.0 floppy on the floor (fucking cats) that I'm going to sell on eBay. Yes, I can still read floppies (USB drive is easiest, but I've got 386 machines that still work). I use a lot of disk space. I keep at least two copies of everything. I know what happens when a drive fails and I've been there with clients on redundant servers. I stayed up all night one time typing in 35 digit codes to reconstruct a storage array because the fuckhead who took out the drive ALSO took out the hot-swap drive. I got it back on-line by morning. It only took ten hours. Then I passed out on the floor under my desk.

I have a Technics turntable and a LaserDisc player and we're going to finish watching "Never Say Never Again" on the LaserDisc player tonight. I'm an old-school geek. I can't change that and have no intention of it. That's what I know. I will NOT apologize for that. And hey, as for a 40GB hard drive, that's recent shit.




On Edit: 150K was a single-sided disk. IBM came out with "TWO-K DISKS" that were really only 360K, but to their credit, they were double-sided.

And the storage wasn't contiguous - it was like having (10 or was it 20) floppies ready for "instant" access.

Ahhh...you young whipper snappers... I had to walk 16 miles....

I think the 33 MB drive was a, what, Nestar? I don't remember, but it weighed about 70 lbs and had six platters.

C was a hard sell back then. People would look at the object code produced and groan.

Ah well, back to 2012..... Thanks for the memories.

It's a lot more efficient and easier to read if you do hex.

by a sufficiently stupid way of solving a problem" - Mary Shaw (the person who really should have received Herbert Simon's Nobel Prize).

... but I'm a little afraid to turn the machine on.

Too many bad experiences with old electrolytic capacitors going firecracker on me.

If I really had to read an 8 inch floppy (nobody's asked me to do that for a long time...) I'd probably rebuild the machine first.

Depending on what's inside, it could be very damaging so some peoples' interests.

That was one of the funniest proto-memes out there. Classic shit.

ETA: Sorry, I read that as "tiger hand." Feel free to ignore, or get out your pen missile.

Frankly, that would surprise me. Suppose they can and that that file contains dynamite.

Remember Assange just wanted to be sure that other hackers couldn't get in.

So, put yourself in the government's shoes. What's your move?

You would have to get your hands on Assange, make him talk, all the while making his "associates" think he's free.

Make a great movie, huh?

of Graphics cards that can do hundreds of parallel processing calculation per second, I'd imagine that you could eventually brute force it. On a CPU it would take forever, but on multiple graphics cards, the time would be quite smaller. Still, you are probably talking about years, if not decades.

Encryption makes it hard to read the data, but not impossible. You need lots and lots and lots and lots of attempts to guess the key. Theoretically, millions of years of attempts for such a brute-force attack.

When people talk about a particular encryption being "broken", they mean you can decrypt the message significantly faster than a brute-force attack.

One problem in encryption is the speed at which you can make those guesses. As computers get faster, those brute-force attacks take less and less time. AES-128 isn't really considered super-secure anymore, because the 128-bit key can be brute-forced in a relatively short time because computers are much faster now.

Another problem is decrypting the data is extremely parallelizable - If you use two computers, it will take roughly 1/2 the time because each machine can simultaneously try different keys. 4 computers, roughly 1/4 the time. And so on.

The NSA has very fast computers. And a common joke is that the NSA measures computing power in acres. Meaning they have a LOT of very fast computers. And further, there's no reason they have to use a "general purpose" computer like on our desktops. They can easily afford specialized computers built to brute force AES even faster.

So while it would take us a billion years to crack the "insurance" file, I would not be surprised to learn the NSA has decrypted it.

Whatever may be in it is likely so dated as to be useless, IMO.

BUT, it is sitting in my external hard drive in case the key is ever released. Not that I would likely ever bother to go through all of that minutia, but meh.

How exactly does using as-yet unreleased sensitive data as a bargaining chip show that someone is "petty and unprincipled"? Seems to me like a straight-forward attempt at self-protection. - B

Don't you want to know what's in those files? Democracy shouldn't keep deep dark secrets from the people.

Exactly. It's all about him. If it's so important, release it now. That and the HIV test refusal unless he gets something he wants prove it entirely. Let him stay stuck in that embassy forever - it's worse than prison. And it's self imposed.

Of course, if someone could safely leak him a new one . . .

However, there is another 65GB file posted in 2012 that has not been compromised. Yet.