Wikileaks just posted 3 dead man switches whatever that means
Link?
According to this The_Donald subreddit poster, they are verification codes, not dm switches:
godofkek
For the non-techie centipedes: these are not encryption keys, but hash values.
Whats a hash value?
It is a “fingerprint” of a file or text string that is easy to compute if you have the source content, but impossible to reverse. Example: the SHA265 hash for “Make America Great Again” (without the quotes) is 10672cb3457840cd94be313e91691ce3017095c4eb917a111f537943ec2624c9. It is impossible to retrieve the original information just from the hash (except for simple words with few characters), but it is very easy to verify that the original string or file is indeed some given hash.
The hash values posted by Wikileaks could be used in two ways:
there is some sort of leak being released in the next few days and those hash values belong to those files. That way anyone who downloads that release can calculate the hash for that file and verify they its the real deal and the release has not been messed with (if a single bit is changed in the archive, it results in a entirely different hash value)
it could be some statement that was hashed. It contains knowledge/proof of something. For Example, if he releases the hash of the string: “Hillary Clinton killed Scalia” (again, without the quotes)... he can later proof that he already had written this string at the time he released the hash value.
Again: the hashes itself are not some encrypted message. Also, they are not a “key” for anything. They are proof/verification for something upcoming.
https://m.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/57tx96/wikileaks_just_posted_what_appears_to_be_a_hash/
The rumor is that the Dead Man Keys have been activated and all files released at once because he is dead.