[duxup]

I think the espionage act topic is worthy of discussion.

The question about the laptop is pretty settled to me. It's against the law to help someone try to break into something like that. I think that is a valid law, doing so is step well outside what a journalist should do, and all of that is regardless if you are successful or not. Also we'll see what he says in court about that, I could have sworn he or his lawyer already noted their lack of success, that sounded like they were talking about actually trying to do it.

I do think in my mind the two topics are tied together, if someone is not behaving as a journalist then I think the context of the charges changes dramatically.

[cyphar]

> The question about the laptop is pretty settled to me.

Why do you keep repeating that he "hacked into laptop"? As I mentioned above, the accusation is related to Chelsea Manning asking him to help them crack a password hash that Manning acquired by dual-booting on a Linux machine and him agreeing to (and Assange never did help Manning crack it).

As I said, I seriously question the truth of such a claim because anyone even slightly technical knows that there's effectively just one tool you use to crack Unix hashes -- johntheripper. I knew that in high-school.

[duxup]

>Why do you keep repeating that he "hacked into laptop"?

I think there might be some confusion here. I didn't say that. You misquoted me in the other reply as well.

We'll see in court if he can prove he did or didn't help.

I don't think how well you know the application in question really has anything to do with the viability of the claim.

[cyphar]

> I don't think how well you know the application in question really has anything to do with the viability of the claim.

My point is that Assange knows what johntheripper is. Any 15-year-old that has downloaded Kali Linux knows what it is. So it seems incredibly strange to act as though breaking a hash is any more complicated than just running johntheripper (or hashcat, or any other brute-force tool) on it.

Assuming their claim is true (that he did actually offer to do it), I would think it most likely he was lying to Manning in order to get them to leak more things. According to most accounts he isn't a particularly nice person, so that seems far more in-character to me.