I don't agree. One thing we do know is that, although Crypto is available and, in special contexts, used, it's use in other contexts is almost counterproduct, sending up a red flag so that those that "Protect Our Freedoms" will come sniffing around and bring to bear their full arsenal of technologies and, possibly, dirty tricks. Merely knowing that you are using stego/crypto in such contexts can cause a lot of attention come your way, possibly in actual meatspace, which in many cases is almost worse than not using crypto at all In addition, although strong and "unbreakable" Crypto exists, one thing a stint on Cypherpunks teaches you is that it is only rarely implemented in such a way as to actually be unbreakable to a determined attacker, particularly if there are not many such cases to examine in such contexts. The clear moral of this story is that, to increase the odds of truly secure communication, etc, Crypto in such contexts must become much more ubiquitous, and I still think Cypherpunks has a role to play there and indeed has played that role. Such a role is, of course, far more than a mere cheerleading role,a fact that merits a continued existence for Cypherpunks in some form or another. -TD Only when Crypto is used ubiquitousl
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> To: cypherpunks@jfet.org Subject: Return of the death of cypherpunks. Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 12:09:36 -0700
-- From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
While I don't exactly know why the list died, I suspect it was the fact that most list nodes offered a feed full of spam, dropped dead quite frequently, and also overusing that "needs killing" thing (okay, it was funny for a while).
The list needs not to stay dead, with some finite effort on our part (all of us) we can well resurrect it. If there's a real content there's even no need from all those forwards, to just fake a heartbeat.
Since cryptography these days is routine and uncontroversial, there is no longer any strong reason for the cypherpunks list to continue to exist.
I recently read up on the Kerberos protocol, and thought, "how primitive". Back in the bad old days, we did everything wrong, because we did not know any better. And of course, https sucks mightily because the threat model is both inappropriate to the real threats, and fails to correspond to the users mental model, or to routine practices on a wide variety of sites, hence users glibly click through all warning dialogs, most of which are mere noise anyway.
These problems, however, are no explicitly political, and tend to be addressed on lists that are not explicitly political, leaving cypherpunks with little of substance.
--digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG AnKV4N6f9DgtOy+KkQ9QsiXcpQm+moX4U09FjLXP 4zfMeSzzCXNSr737bvqJ6ccbvDSu8fr66LbLEHedb