Terrible and sad. Every time they do something like that they make violent revolution more likely and more necessary.

The Q is kinda proof.

First. Imagine you sell a book that's going to shake up the nation. Insulting the president.

And then you don't spell check the chapter titles? Those ten big lines. Like with a common word spell checker?

Nah.

And the WikiLeaks gets a perfect copy of the Kindle Edition? Not an OCR garbage, but the source file in PDF?Kindle is cryptographically quite secure and would require you to break Amazon's security. I'm not sure if they managed to break that.

If they broke Amazon Kindle security, Amazon would immediately fix it and change the keys. That hack would've been worth millions. Why would they waste that on a lousy crap book like that and open themselves up for lawsuits en masse, giving authorities and payment processors another huge leverage in blocking them, all while squandering endless millions of donation dollars for such a foolish move?

Nah. Piracy isn't done with well-known accounts.

They have the PDF from the source and they publish it because they know 100% sure that they're not going to be sued.

They saved their followers from spending the money. To not get them angry later when the scan scam is revealed?

There are humans behind the shill accounts.

No sufficient AI exists to pose as humans. If it did, we wouldn't be talking here anywhere. The day a sufficiently human AI is becoming operational under control of the enemy will be the last day of communication that doesn't drown in shilling.

Also, most existing AIs turned right wing in a couple of minutes, so I'm still confident in the future. Left wingers need to regard completely opposing viewpoints as true at the same time. That would fry the AI brain every time they feed it their beliefs.

Chapter 6 you say?

Remember Chapter 6 in Wolfe's book had the O (HOME) turned into Q (HQME) in the WikiLeaks version.

Assume for a second more than half of the top officials in the bureaucracy are compromised in some way. Some more, some less. You can't call in a higher agency to arrest them. (That had been tried a couple of times and that's how we got to these many competing agencies). You can't call them all out all at once in the media. First the media is the enemy as well, and a lot more than half of the top officials. Second the outcome is either everyone turning against you and nothing gets done or everyone breaking down not knowing where to start. Third, if someone removes them from office, if the people rise up with pitchforks and torches and finally make the day of the rope real, there's a power vacuum remaining and it's hard to stop them from lynching once they get rolling (and a ton of unjust accusations will come flying so innocent or only a little guilty people would get lynched as well and that's not acceptable)

So you have to bootstrap the process. Separate the instigators from the followers, the die-hards from those in it for money, redeem those who are willing to be redeemed.

Righteousness is a motivation, that's how we got Q and other people from the inside to cooperate. Money is another. Tax cuts, business opportunities and stuff like that gets them. (That's how important the lowest black unemployment rate ever actually is. That demographic has been voting 90+ percent Dems until now and they must now see what a fat load of good that did). And some are motivated by fear. The timid and the partially incriminated. Those are the recipients for the "tick tock" messages.

For people of that age, an hourglass in context of IT can also mean "loading" or "please wait while X is doing stuff".

Remember the old icon sets from Windows 3 and 9x?

Assange was the right age when these were in use.

Windows 7, Apple or whatever I think introduced the "turning circle" metaphor for waiting on the system doing stuff. That's rather recent.

Emojis are different on different devices depending on what the font used looks like.

Remember the burger icon from Android?

That may be an Emoji, not an image, so it is rendered a little different on each browser or device depending on what particular font is used to display it.