Comment by agd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by agd | Hacker News Reader

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He actually went into a rather interesting discussion about what would constitute valid proof of life. His summary is that a combination of the following is useful:

- live video where the person can interact with a live feed e.g. reddit

- social proof, e.g. all his lawyers/friends say that he is ok (the cost to fake this would be too high)

- reading a recent blockchain hash (he did this on the livestream but in general dislikes this method as most people won't understand it)

- reading sports results from recent matches, he did this for some US sports results, this is simpler to understand and verify for most people, stick to higher scoring sports to avoid doubts over enumerating all possibilities

Edit: all of this becomes much more difficult as tech improves because you can CGI someone in real-time. But (!) this is not possible yet.

> this is not possible yet.

Take a good look:

https://youtu.be/ohmajJTcpNk

It seems likely that he really is alive, but AFAIK, there's been no recent signature from a wikileaks private key. People on reddit seem to be convinced he's not in control of the keys anymore, which is somewhat disturbing.

He specifically addressed this. He stated that setting a precendent for proof-of-life via a PGP message is bad and they wanted to avoid doing it. It's bad because it doesn't actually prove anything. He said it is hard to secure PGP keys, and under extreme pressure Wikileaks may lose some.

Really if you don't believe he's alive for the reasons I posted above, it's likely that nothing will convince you!

biggerfisch is not talking about a Proof-Of-Life with the PGP key, but a statement to confirm that the key is safe right now, it isn't compromised, and why WikiLeaks don't sign messages anymore

He addressed that [roughly from memory - //this is not a quote//]:

Our concern is that that would reduce the proof of life to a specific methodology. Key management is complex. Primary proof is social proof, lawyers, Pilger, et al. It would be extremely costly for adversary to create conspiracy involving all these actors.

When in the twitch stream did he read a recent blockchain hash? I can't find this.

Edit: in the twitch stream 1:35:30 he starts talking about it but he doesn't actually read a hash

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