Here’s an interesting detail about Mr Assange that just popped into my mailbox:
Mr. Assange’s exploits were detailed in a 1997 book he co-authored called Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. The book chronicles some of the most notorious hacking incidents of the 1980s and 90s – back when Mr. Assange went by the nickname Mendax, from the poet Horace’s “splendide mendax,” or “nobly untruthful.” In his introduction to the book, Mr. Assange quotes Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
via CTV News | 2010 may go down in history as the year of the hacker.
… Classicists will probably recognize splendide mendax as coming from Horace Odes 3.11, which tells the tale of those daughters of Danaus, most of whom ended up as ‘sieval engineers’ in the underworld. The ‘nobly untruthful’ one was Hypermnestra … we’ll have to see if Assange is saved by Aphrodite’s intervention …
