Assange: 'I'm fond of your work, Cumberbatch, but let's leave it at that' This was the week when billionaire Julian Robertson decided to dump all of his Apple stock because he read a biography of Steve Jobs and decided he didn't like him all that much. After perusing a bio of the late founder of the fruity firm, Robertson decided that Jobs wasn't a totally nice guy so he was going to sell off his …
As I understand it, the combination of unusual font and font size he chose meant that, even if you were reading by eye, it was difficult to determine correctly what all the characters were. As a result, even someone manually typing in the key would likely get at least a few wrong because of the legibility of it. He could probably have gotten away with it had humans been able to read it reasonably easily, but when it crosses over to illegible then he hasn't really provided them with the key
"If they did not specify how it should be delivered that's there problem."
No chance. A judge will simply rule that the intent of the order was perfectly clear (to get the keys to read email) and that you're obstructing justice if you stand in the way of this. He also went out of his way to deliberately make the keys impractical to use; hence contempt.
Personally I think it was an incredibly brave action shutting down the service; and an action for which I have huge respect. He could have found himself the lucky winner of an all-expenses-paid one-way holiday in an exotic South American resort; and there isn't a judge serving who would have lifted a finger to help him.
Enorme cojones, señor Levinson.
Interesting interview Q+A with Levison
lavabit-founder-ladar-levison-discusses-his-federal-battle-for-privacy
... lots of little lessons in there.
"but only as strings of numbers printed out on paper, rather than as electronic files, intentionally printing them in a font designed to be hard to scan"
Hint for the future: If it wouldn't work with your second grade teacher, it's probably not gonna work with a federal judge.
Regardless of what WikiLeaks did or did not do Assange has a very different stance on truth when it comes to himself. Strangely he quite likes to control what is or isn't seen as true about him and seems to value privacy.
> Strangely he ... seems to value privacy.
Well, in this instance I happen to agree with him. The secrecy of a state's often dirty dealings and the privacy of an individual deserve to be seen and handled differently.
No. If Gov had no secrets it would be impossible to protect its citizens in any kind of meaningful way.
Abuse of privacy in government is obviously bad, but embarassing diplomats for having opinions is just petty vandalism and doesn't achieve anything "positive" (Assange's choice of terminology).
Reading his personal communications convinces me of one thing; he is a net.kook. I have a lot of experience of them, and his writing has much in common, never mind the fact that net.kooks tend to be monomaniacs. Ghastly creature.
Is it really hard to figure out that personal privacy and government transparency are 2 sides of the same coin?
Of course Assange likes privacy, for himself and Wikileaks - neither of them are governments, and aside from any question of breaking laws, neither is in the public interest.
Nevertheless, privacy of soldiers or government contractors to kill civilians isn't the right to privacy covered in the Constitution, nor is the privacy for heads-of-state to siphon off billions to offshore bank accounts.
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"Although, confusingly, if Jobs were still alive and running Apple, Robertson would reconsider his position"
I don't think that's particularly confusing. What I got from that statement was that Jobs, the "genius with a heart of black" was able to whip his slaves staff into shape, and convince his disciples customers that what they wanted was the same product, slightly improved and repackaged, year after year. And while he was at the helm, that happened.
Without him, under the leadership of Cook the Timid, his people are now let loose, and the Apple wheels are starting to fall off. Makes sense to me.
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