paulshort

"How to win ... (hint get your unique product on Amazon)"

This password would be really hard to crack.

T#!$ p@$$w0rd w0uld &e re@lly #@rd t0 cr@ck.

T#!$p@$$w0rdw0uld&ere@lly#@rdt0cr@ck

The passwords for my important stuff look much like the above. Just write a sentence that's easy to remember, replace letters with the special characters they look like and blend it all together. Works a treat.

"You don't want to piss off the State Department. They can make things very difficult you in the future."

That is the real problem here. Even though the SD can't, or hasn't yet figured out how to charge Wikileaks with a criminal offense, they wield their power as a bullying tactic to get what they want.

"Comply, or else ..." is an abuse of power and is exactly what wikileaks was set up to expose in the first place. Even if the SD does succeed in trouncing wikileaks into oblivion, that very act serves to expose how corrupt governments can be.

My main home computer, a laptop, is named Workhorse. But after seeing some of the creative naming techniques people in this thread have used, the next machine(s) added to my home network will be named using Klingon swear words.

I quite like the idea of using the word 'petaQ' to name a computer, especially if it happens to be a Windows machine.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but one of the most efficient ways to "behead the beast" (so to speak) when an organization is doing uncool things, is to cut off their ability to make money.

Wikileaks is set up to expose stuff that makes other organizations uncomfortable. Make Wikileaks disappear and those organizations feel comfortable again.

It's not hard to file a bunch of complaints with PayPal and have someone's account suspended.

After millions of years of being forced to use our wits to survive combined with periods of inbreeding (resulting in a relatively narrow genome), humans are now a super-race of genetic mutants ahead of our time on the evolutionary scale. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if being too smart for our own good contributed to our demise.

Edit: By "inbreeding" I mean - if the human population were reduced to a few thousand breeding individuals, and those individuals were also spreading or migrating into different areas of Africa, the middle East, Europe, etc. at the same time, that would mean much smaller groups of people who breed within their "community." It may have been thousands or tens of thousands of years before those different communities met up with each other and combined genetic material again.

This is one of the most interesting articles I've read in quite some time.

The main reason he was caught is not necessarily that he was careless or left clues, he was caught because the whole thing was designed to be a game (experiment?) orchestrated by Wired. Ratliff had hundreds, maybe even thousands of people with incentives ($5000, notoriety, the challenge, etc.) looking for him. I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did given that he was also 'trying' to get caught.

However, as other commenters in this thread mention, if he had done this independently and planned a little longer than he did, he most certainly could have vanished for up to a year.

Edit: spelling.

It's mentioned somewhere in the article that Ratliff's editor at Wired was given access to his bank accounts. The editor then leaked details of the transactions online.

Hucksters?

Cocky, maybe. But huckster? No.

Darren Rowse is one of the most successful bloggers out there when it comes to monetizing his sites and he discloses the details of how and why he earns money on his problogger.net site.

In addition to several of his own successful blogs, he's also one of the co-founders of b5media which has gotten (approximately) 8 million in funding since it's launch in 2005. Darren's expertise in blogging and their monetization was a crucial factor in getting that funding.

This reply will probably be downmodded but I don't really care about that. Before shoving him into the 'huckster' category, do a little more open-minded research next time.

By the way, that huckster is also the minister of a small youth oriented church in his city.

Apologies for seeming harsh, but your comment was blatent and unfair.

I agree. Some of the best poetry I've ever read has been about hardship. I think I would rather read a poem that was scrawled on the back of an unpaid utility bill than the musings of a comfortable millionaire.