[remove reflective headgear, cough, adjust nomex underwear, blow whistle..]
Good afternoon.
Having just percipitated an accidental thread on rockets, I'm not one to talk, really. That's never really stopped me before, of course...
Chill out. This is a quiet day on Cypherpunks, and clearly a lot of people have views on this. If you'd rather debate whether multiplicative Abelian subgroups contain inverses which can be used for crypto purposes, go ahead.
However, if someone could tell me a direct relationship between strong crypto and parental values, control of one's offspring, evangelical christianity, and other inherent Rights of Mankind(tm), I would greatly appreciate it...
The connection, tenuous (but no more tenuous that a hundred other threads these past two years), is that of source-level or receiver-level blocking is central to many of the proposals here and in general: * Centralized control: Source-level blocking. "We must protect the innocents from X" (Where X is, variously: pro-Christian material, anti-Christian material, pro/con Muslim, Mormon, Jewish, etc. material, violent images, Barney images, sex, anti-sex, etc.). * Decentralized, market control: Receiver-level blocking. "I'll decide what I want to see." Local filter agents, local control. (This includes voluntary services like Prodigy, provided an alternative exists.) Strong crypto makes the second view impossible to stop. Is this enough of a connection? Or should we declare this debate illegal and go back to asking what the best way to generate random numbers is? (I'm not dissin' the random number people...we've just seen that debate too many times, with too little advance progress by people who refuse to check out the Blum-Blum-Shub papers and whatnot.) I doubt I can convince Nathan Zooks that his idea for a world-wide police state to ensure that children are not exposed to anti-Christian material is a lousy idea, or that I can convince Mike Duvos that his idea of mandating access to Nathan's "Funny Mentalist" children so as to de-program them is an equally lousy idea, but I sure do hope I can convince most of you that central control just doesn't work. Let the ideas compete, but don't argue for a Net that is what the Unites States was ostensibly organized to avoid. It ain't perfect, and neither will crypto-anarchy be perfect, but it beats having cops come to my door. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."