So, what would be a "cypherpunk" thing you could do with Java? I know I can use it to download little applets to my system to do animations. What can it do to enhance my privacy? What would be the Java equivalent of PGP?
Portable PGP with a GUI interface that didn't suck? Note that I'm championing the use of Java as a portable language, with a portable windowing toolkit, that will (real soon now) have commercial tool support from a variety of vendors, as well as free tools available on the net (the best of both worlds.) The whole issue of how to do cryptography with applets is kind of complicated, and is something Amanda and I have been working on very dilligently. They hard part is determining what the interface is between trusted code (that you have installed on your machine, or ultimately, that you've specifically designated as being trusted based on secure hash) and untrusted code that comes from random web sites on the net. In general, for any general-purpose cryptography tool, you're going to want almost all of it to be based on locally-installed, trusted code. Certain protocols can actually work much better using applets, but they should only be allowed to access a very narrow set of local routines that directly interface with the user. (e.g. "Do you really want to sign this?", "Confirmed signed by so-and-so.", etc.) This is, however, a separate issue from the use of Java to do standalone applications. See: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/achou/JCrypt/packages.html