Anyone know why the Wikileaks "insurance" file shrank to 214MB?

[derby378]

Did someone hack it from the outside? Just curious.

[Towlie]

1. What in the world are you talking about?

I checked my copy and it's still exactly 1,491,834,576 bytes long, and it still has the SHA-1 checksum of cce54d3a8af370213d23fcbfe8cddc8619a0734c

[derby378]

5. Check the version on the site today against your copy (n/t)

[Towlie]

15. On the Wikileaks site it's still reported as 1.4 GB.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

Incidentally, the page says "To decompress the files you will need the program 7zip..." but that's probably not true for the insurance.aes256 file. Julian Assange knows what he's doing and almost certainly knows that it makes no sense to attempt to compress an encrypted file - it only makes it grow a little.

On the other hand, file compression programs also offer the benefit of combining many separate files into a single file for convenience, so he may have used 7zip for that reason.

[drm604]

2. What makes you think it shrunk?

:shrug:

[Ruby the Liberal]

3. I think it was reported as 1.4gb when originally released.

[derby378]

4. It used to be 1.4GB in size

That's a pretty substantial reduction.

[drm604]

7. I understand that it was 1.4GB. It still is as far as I can tell.

My question was, why do you think that it's shrunk?

As far as I can tell it hasn't shrunk and is still 1.4GB.

Why do you think that it's now smaller than that? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand what your evidence is for that. I haven't actually tried to download the whole thing but it's still being reported as being 1.4GB in size.

[Towlie]

9. I don't know what went wrong with your download but it doesn't matter.

You can get the file via Bittorrent and from an exponentially growing number of other sources. You can also get simple SHA-1 hash utilities from a number of sources, including microsoft.com. As long as the file you have passes an SHA-1 check with the hash of cce54d3a8af370213d23fcbfe8cddc8619a0734c then it's the legitimate "Insurance" file from Julian Assange.

Nobody, no matter how powerful or clever, will ever be able to make that file disappear.

[jgraz]

6. He got a better deal from Geico?

:hide:

[Name removed]

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[EFerrari]

10. A "warrior's" address? Uncle Don, is that you?

[Name removed]

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[derby378]

13. The blind man told this guy he saw it all...

...through the hole in the barbed-wire fence! :rofl:

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[hobbit709]

14. downloading it right now as torrent. 1.4 Gb.

[Towlie]

16. Get the SHA-1 utility from Microsoft here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841290

Verify that the correct SHA-1 hash is cce54d3a8af370213d23fcbfe8cddc8619a0734c here:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

SHA-1 is a cryptographic hash that has the property that it's virtually impossible with current technology to create a different file that returns the same hash as the one from any given file. If you know the hash that a file should have, and you verify that the file you have does indeed return that hash, then you can have extreme confidence that the file is authentic and exact in all respects down to the last bit, regardless of where and how you acquired the file.

[hobbit709]

17. it's the real deal.