startwearinggreen

Julian Assange has a "private key", whose "public key" we, the public, know. This means he, and only he or someone else with that key, can sign messages in a special way that anyone can verify. Basically, only someone with that key (presumably Julian Assange) can sign in this special way, but everyone can verify the signature.

If you want to know more about how maths make this kind of magic possible, the keyword you want is "public key cryptography".

The question here asks Julian Assange, or whoever is claiming to be him, to write a statement and include some data that he couldn't have known before that date (so we know the message is more recent than that date), include a "nonce" (basically a random value that the questioner picked, so Julian Assange couldn't have predicted it before).

This would give us rather good confidence that someone (we can't know if it's Julian Assange or someone else) is able to sign messages today using his key.

They can, that's why he's asking people to make copies.

The PHP dungeon? That's called Facebook. That would be really mean.

Oh, sorry, I meant air marshalls, not flying crew. I've heard the occasional story of a drunk FA or pilot, but that's really rare. On the other hand a lot of people talk about drunk air marshalls quite often. Just wondering how much of that is a urban legend.

Those teams must be huge, and in a major outage, throwing more and more people probably doesn't help much. They can certainly spare one guy on PR while the rest of the team is handling the panic.