> I don't think how well you know the application in question really has anything to do with the viability of the claim.
My point is that Assange knows what johntheripper is. Any 15-year-old that has downloaded Kali Linux knows what it is. So it seems incredibly strange to act as though breaking a hash is any more complicated than just running johntheripper (or hashcat, or any other brute-force tool) on it.
Assuming their claim is true (that he did actually offer to do it), I would think it most likely he was lying to Manning in order to get them to leak more things. According to most accounts he isn't a particularly nice person, so that seems far more in-character to me.
I think there might be some confusion here. I didn't say that. You misquoted me in the other reply as well.
We'll see in court if he can prove he did or didn't help.
I don't think how well you know the application in question really has anything to do with the viability of the claim.