Computer science professor Christian Grothoff testifies in Assange hearing | Hacker News Reader

Computer science professor Christian Grothoff testifies in Assange hearing

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This article from 2011 is an interesting read, about the publishing of the password to the Wikileaks file in a Guardian book: https://web.archive.org/web/20110925132344/http://nigelparry...

I'm going to have to read that, as came across it in this[1] article by his ghostwriter, who puts it down to Julian being paranoid.

quote here:

How far was he willing to go in order to fuck everybody off? The answer came on 1 September. Having canvassed his followers on Twitter, Julian decided to dump the whole cache of 250,000 US cables supplied to him by Bradley Manning on the internet. He blamed the Guardian – a tactic I recognise from many of his sorties – and especially David Leigh. He insisted Leigh had included a password in his book that could decrypt the files WikiLeaks had left online. Leigh has always said this is nonsense. The manoeuvre brought so many infamous Julian tropes together: the hatred of the US; the showing off about security while having no real sense of how it works (why were the files left online?); the ‘blame culture’ in which any enemy of his must be shown to have failed.

[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n05/andrew-o-hagan/ghost...

> He insisted Leigh had included a password in his book that could decrypt the files WikiLeaks had left online. Leigh has always said this is nonsense.

How is it notable that Leigh said something is nonsense that can easily be verified by anyone? This is a tactic I recognize from a lot of propaganda: when repeating something that is known to be factually inaccurate, attribute it to someone else. This work of art not only does that, but surrounds it with "tactic I recognise" "Julian tropes" and "'blame culture'".

The last I put in double quotes, because I'm pretty sure it's not a quote, it's a thought being projected into Assange's head. Not even good propaganda.

The unredacted cables were already available online before 1 September 2011, because two Guardian journalists published the password to the encrypted archive.

The Guardian continues to deny its responsibility for making the unredacted cables available. It says that people at the Guardian believed the password to the file was "temporary" (how does a password to an encrypted archive stop working after a given time?), and that WikiLeaks should have deleted the file from the internet (it was already mirrored on different sites beyond WikiLeaks' control).

I'm willing to believe that people at the Guardian were just technically incompetent and didn't know that publishing the password to the archive would make it available to everyone. But denying responsibility after the fact is just malicious.

> Leigh has always said this is nonsense.

The password is in the book, for everyone to see. Why do people lie about things that are so easily verifiable?

ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#

https://rixstep.com/2/20131001,00.shtml

Christian Grothoff explains that the material was already available online in encrypted form. By the time Wikileaks made them public, people had already decrypted them thanks to Guardian journalists revealing the password in their book. Blame clearly lies with the Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding for being reckless with the password.

> WikiLeaks made the unredacted cache available after they were available on the other sites, on 2nd September 2011

> The materials at that time were already available online "in a way that was virtually impossible to stop"

I love this article and I think about it every time I see Assange in the news.

Ignoring whatever you think of his actions and the political ramifications, it paints a vivid picture of a deeply flawed human.

... And that picture is based completely on Assange being "autistic", "on the spectrum", "paranoid" and "narcissistic" - because he thinks his voice is important, that left wing media have been derelict in their duty and stabbed him in the back, and that powerful people are spying on him and want him assassinated.

That all of those things :are true: just doesn't factor in to O'Hagan's assessment, at all. He doesn't even begin to explore the possibility.

This speaks much more to O'Hagan's deep flaws than Assange's.

There is also the little problem of Assange believing that Leigh was part of a Jewish conspiracy against him—not the only time that his antisemitism has revealed itself.

https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/julian-assange-s-antisemitic-p...

I'm not seeing where your link makes any such claim.

It quotes Assange as saying ‘forget the Jewish thing’, after he allegedly pointed out that a number of people :shown to have lied about him: were Jewish.

BTW, 'The JC' were very big on the claim that Corbyn is an anti-semite, while effusive in their praise for Boris Johnson... Sorry but that's proper batty.

I had a look at their US news page, and while they had a front-page story about a BUDDHIST swastika necklace, the :forced sterilisation: scandal seems to have passed them by.

And if there's anything in their news about this trial and it's irregularities, and the significance to journalism, I haven't found it.

You might not want to take them too seriously.

I’m not taking “them” seriously. What they report is factual—I’ve seen the quote by Assange repeated elsewhere. It‘s just a convenient reference. So most of your remarks smack of the ad-hominem. If someone says “A and B and C are acting against me—and they’re all Jewish,” that sounds to me like an antisemite complaining about a Jewish conspiracy against him. You are welcome to interpret it differently. Perhaps you find such rantings perfectly normal. But my interpretation is at least somewhat reinforced by some other comments made by Assange, complaining about Jewish journalists.

Wooow - that essay aged like milk. Not that it was much good to begin with - the majority of his criticism is based on calling Assange "paranoid" and "narcissistic" - because he thought there were people trying to spy on him and assassinate him.

Which there very much were.

I was curious if O'Hagan is at all apologetic, now that Assange's "paranoia" has been conclusively justified, but at least on his Twitter he shows no interest in the topic whatsoever.

Thanks for saving me any money I might ever have spent on his writing.

Slightly OT: the German magazine "Der Freitag" (https://www.freitag.de/) seems to play a certain role in the order of events discussed in this hearing. I keep different sources referring to it as "Die Freitag" however. Why is that?

The newspaper is called "der Freitag," however the German Zeitung (newspaper) is feminine and therefore would suggest "die." So it appears that people do not recognize that "der" is part of the title, and then make the mistake to use the wrong article since deducing the gender from the category newspaper does not work here.

Any linguistic information experts here that can comment as to whether there is some informational advantage to having random nouns assigned “genders” like German, French, etc. do? As in, if we were considering a programming language would all the work involved with matching gendered nouns, adjectives, etc. get us any gains in expressiveness or any other benefit. I love the French language and wouldn’t want it changed, just have always wondered if there’s a “point” to eg a table being feminine.

“Gender” is the exact term for this; no need for the quotation marks. As an English native speaker, when studying romance languages I never found genders to serve any purpose (other than to make the languages harder to learn). But it’s an interesting speculation.

It reduces anaphora ambiguity. Compared with gendered pronouns in English (some languages have gender neutral pronouns).

Bob and Alice went to the beach, but only he got a nasty sunburn.

Bob and Alice went to the beach, but only "it" got a nasty sunburn.

While it could resolve ambiguities when discussing two objects that happen to have different grammatical genders, it seems it would introduce more anaphoric ambiguities when discussing a person and object with the same gender.

For example:

"George a laissé tomber le livre et son dos était cassé."

Which back was broken here, George's or the books?

No genuine ambiguity here, it's the book (and I suspect that's typical). Even if you increased the ratio of theoretically ambiguous sentences, if that comes at a decrease of actual, practical ambiguity (uintended and unnoticed by the speaker) that's a win.

The newspaper is probably also known as just "Freitag" (without "der"). Newspaper in German is female ("die Zeitung"). When saying "the newspaper Freitag" it changes to "die Zeitung Freitag". You can leave out "Zeitung" if the context is known and thus it gets shortened to "die Freitag".

I'm not from a region where this newspaper is common so I'm just guessing here. This is common when talking about newspapers in German.

Disclaimer: not German speaker so please correct me.

The name of the newspaper is "der Freitag" (masculine) but Before it was called just "Freitag". Newspaper itself is feminine (die Zeitung) so I suspect any use as "die Freitag" is a contraction of "die Freitag Zeitung" and coming from German speakers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet

Evidently he is one of the good guys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet

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