somenomadicguy

> Is this due to Assange? Or due to the war on whistleblowers? Given the resource constraints of WL, Assange must choose between publishing unredacted information and not publishing at all.

Again, your argument is yet another conspiracy theory. You can't argue against this, because no matter what, it's the Cigarette Smoking Man in the background. And the resource-constraint argument is an excuse for sloppy, irresponsible journalism.

The argument that wikileaks is not at all affected by Assange's emotional and mental state seems to be an attempt to make him out to be an altruistic, infallible god, not a human .

Major news caters more towards the people that give them money, and they base their content choices on their sponsors.

It seems that every time Assange has a bowel movement, all of the major news sources write about it as front-page news, and immediately every comment is about how no major news outlet is reporting on wikileaks.

> Are you arguing that the information revealed by the DNC emails is not a reflection of very significant character flaws in Clinton?

I haven't read them all, so can you clue me into what they exposed about her directly in contrast to what they exposed about the DNC organization?

And were you aware of my other point, his attacks on Zeynep from the New York times? She pointed out the danger the leaks put women in. Instead of saying, "hey, that leak wasn't our fault, but mea culpa anyways, we're sorry". Then when she pointed out that if he'd had some Turks read the emails they'd have laughed and said "don't bother", he again went into a campaign of character assaults against her?

I think this is newsworthy because wikileaks does not maintain the journalistic integrity we expect of them, they never retract their mistakes, nor do they apologize.

OK then. The AKP leak exposed nothing, but rather added to an incredibly stressful and precarious situation in Türkiye. It carelessly aided in doxing most women in Türkiye. It helped spread malware. It was a good opportunity to co-opt the press around the coup.

To answer this honestly, I don't know. It would depend on the quality of the data he leaked, and which hostile foreign enemy he sided with against him.

On one hand, I have daughters, and don't want misogynistic defenders of rape-culture having any power over them.

On the other hand, I care about fairness and justice.

On my third hand (yay radiation!), Clinton is an evil sociopath who is bound to be largely ineffective as your president thanks to a republican legislature. Trump, however, is an incompetent demagogue who I think will cause a massive amount of un-needed suffering in this world.

So my honest answer is, I don't know. It probably depends on if I'd taken my meds that day and how emotional I was feeling.

The first 1/2 of your argument: CIA. Let me be clear, I don't support Clinton, Trump, or anybody else, I feel you have to be an evil sociopath to even want to be a world leader.

I think he is just playing sides. Trump doesn't give a crap, but Hillary knows he's after her. Putin has shown an eager willingness to give asylum to Snowden, him, and anybody else. I just think he's a sociopathic narcissist who watched too many thrillers and wants to wield power against governments.

   - Strong willingness to work with mainstream news outlets to create high production quality investigative journalism (Assange has done all he possibly could).

In the beginning, sure, I'll admit you were right on this. The past year or two, however, wikileaks has failed to produce anything of substance. It's "leaks" (of Turkish dessert recipes) have been sloppy at best, irresponsible and dangerous at worst. Not even Fox would be as careless as he was with the personal data of millions of women in an islamist country. Sean Hannity isn't exactly Woodward and Bernstein.

  - Resilience to meddling by the many enemies one makes (Assange has done well with this).

Has he? He seems to be attempting to wield his power against his enemies. Is that resilience, or vendetta?

   - Reinforcing the strength and bias-free nature of the institution (Assange has made clear that he finds Trump and Hillary both despicable, yet this comment is ignored by many such as yourself).

His actions state otherwise. I'm not sure who posts more anti-clinton rhetoric, Trump or Assange. Lately Wikileaks' feed has have been emotional responses to criticisms and perceived sleights, and heavily biased character attacks on his perceived enemies. There hasn't actually been any journalism that I can see.

Assange has a problem with women. His character assaults against Clinton and journalist Zeynep Tukfeci are pretty good indicators of this.

Assange is absolutely a criminal for breaking the terms of his bail. The sexual assault charges, however, are unproven, and he really deserves his day in court, whether he is guilty or innocent. I hadn't heard the anti-semite bit before, however.

There might be a much simpler reason for all of this. Being stuck in the embassy for years has severely taxed his emotional stability, encouraging narcissism, paranoia, and victimhood. At the very least, his journalism is sloppy, irresponsible, and ever-decreasing in integrity.

I read through about 1/2 of the AKP "leaks", it was a tremendous waste of time for anything but improving comprehension of Türkçe.

At a point in time, I truly believed Assange's goals were justice and transparency, now I am beginning to feel like he has his own political agenda, and is making sophomoric attempts to affect political change.

In 2016 Wikileaks's agenda seems to be:

  - Anti-Hillary
  - Anti-Hillary
  - Pro-Trump
  - Pro-Putin
  - Anti-Hillary
  - Opportunistic

The AKP leak falls into that last line. The coup happened, it was frightening (I watched two F-16s fly over the city at mach1+ for six-hours, and the helicopter which landed at BJK was so close to us at a cafe we could see the faces of the guys inside when it banked), and they capitalized on that fear to increase their own credibility and to demonize the ruling party here.

Unlike previous leaks Assange and his gang didn't put ANY effort into vetting the "leak". He didn't have to, because within certain crowds Wikileaks is an indisputably trusted source. His perceived persecution makes him beyond reproach, and now any criticism can be blamed on a conspiracy theory.

Rapist? CIA/Sweden persecuting him. Bail jumper? CIA/Mi5 persecution. Committed the crime of jumping bail? CIA/Mi5. Hiding in Ecuador for years? Illegal CIA detention. His best buddy Jake Appelbaum is a rapist? CIA.

This amount of trust and credibility would certainly make it easier for him, or a foreign agent, to spread malware. It's probably just a slip-up on not scanning the emails before publishing. But if it isn't, what are the odds that they are traced back to Russian hackers?

(Edited for typos and formatting. )

I'm curious why should you expect them to have a two-word name written in latin letters? You are the most diverse country in the world, every language, nationality and tribe is represented there.

At least in the states, legal regulations on names vary from place to place. In the state of Texas, if you're a lawyer, you are legally required to tell people this, most commonly done by adding the Esq abbreviation for Esquire at the end of your name. I have a friend who's official name (of course I've obfuscated this) is "Dr. Firstname b. Lastname PhD, Esq.".

Oh man, I really feel for her. Dealing with the various immigration agencies must have been a nightmare. I bet they ended up officially changing her name to "Firstname Firstname", which is what we tend to do in the states..

This bugs me, because if a name is supposed to be a unique identifier, then part of it's existence is to feed the ego. "This is ME! I am Jean Valjean!"

When you then you change somebody's name to fit your short-sighted database constraints you're pretty much saying, "You don't matter as much as our programmers' decisions matter, now move along 9430"

I have a very, very generic name. I lived in a hacker warehouse a lifetime ago where there were 3 of us with the same exact name, so yeah, the address part alone isn't that important.I always make up a fake address, often a police station or a garbage dump, and treat that address as a throwaway.

Sure, that's a reasonable corner case to be concerned with. But, what if you forgot what fake name you gave them? Or what if your name is John Smith and so are 50,000 others in their database?

While designing or refactoring an app, ask yourself, "Do I really need her name or address? Will I risk their privacy and security if my database is compromised? What will I do with this information? Will I sell it to advertisers, or will I ignore it? Will I alienate any potential customers by following the first-name last-name standard?

Really, this has me thinking, WHY do we have a last name? It's basically nationalism for families. "I am Eric, the son of John Smith!" .. So what? Who cares what your family's name was? Think about it. The only time anybody has ever addressed me with my full-name it was in a government context. Are two names really required for a UUID? Why only two? Why not four?

Immigrant officials at Ellis Island used to give people last names based on their father's first name, or the name of the city they come from.

Also, Armenians didn't have last names until recently, so you'll meet lots of people with names like "Gevork Gevorkian" or "Ohan Ohanesian", or their name will be shifted to the right, adding an "ian" to the end (think the prefixed O' in irish names), and give them anglicized names.

One could change #40 to: You need your customers' names. I look at a name the same way I look at a username, more frequently than not it's a hassle you don't need to solve. In many applications a username, or even better, an email address, is the best UUID for a user.

We design apps to collect names by default, even when we don't need them and will never use them for any purpose, or at worse, the purpose we use them for is violation of privacy.