Anonymous wrote:
I challenge anyone here to answer the question of what it means to be a cypherpunk. What are your goals? What is your philosophy? Do you
In this day and age, do you realy expect anyone to answer questions like that openly and honestly? Really. There's a similar and simple label that gets used and abused by people who might either be technically competent engineers, or merely script kiddies: hacker. These days, being a hacker is nearly enough the moral equivalent of being a Communist in California during the Fifties. Or a leper. Note how the term 'hacker' is normally used, as a perjorative, in writings and speech found in the mainstream media. If a journalist for Time Magazine uses the label 'hacker' in a perjorative context, chances are that a letter-writing campaign launched in earnest for the purpose of reclaiming the defintion preferred by engineers, will at best produce a tiny correction buried in a corner of a subsequent issue. And then some other writer will make the same mistake later. The same applies to the term `cyperhpunk', only the term is rarely used outside of the Internet. Quite frankly, I couldn't care less what label applies to me. I'm somewhat knowledgeable on issues that are said to be characteristic of the focus of 'cypherpunks', but I don't pray every day with a reading from the Cypherpunk Manifesto.
even recognize the notion of right and wrong? Or is it all simply a matter of doing whatever you can get away with, of grabbing what you can while you can, of looting your betters for your own short term benefit?
Depends on the person, I guess.
Is that what it means to be a cypherpunk today? Because that's how it looks from here.
Perhaps a comprehensive survey should be done. A comprehensive questionaire in the form of a purity test might do it, as might something like a geek code for 'cypherpunks'... Do you read Applied Cryptography? Have you ever generated a 16 kbit RSA key? Do you have a picture of Ralph Merkle hanging on the wall in your bedroom? etc. Face it. You aren't going to get straight answers to questions from highly technical internet sophisticates, even if you ask politely. They have better things to do than to justify and explain their ideologies when in fact such is easily read from the body of their work, and implicit to their writings. Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca