On Sat, May 10, 1997 at 06:17:56PM -0400, Black Unicorn wrote:
On Sat, 10 May 1997, Adam Back wrote:
Tim May <tcmay@got.net> writes:
However, while we may think their power is gone, or is almost gone, they think otherwise. And we're seeing an accelerating pace of lawmaking, [...]
[The fork in the road is discussed]
Who will actually win?
I think we will. They think they will. The war is underway.
So what are we doing to fight our side? (Apart from fantasizing about nuking the bastards till they glow :-)
So what can cypherpunks do?
Write code?
Yes. One of the major stumbling blocks I have run into is a lack of code which really is refined and reviewed enough to serve the purposes I need it to serve. FC97 did a lot to make some more obscure things obvious, and familiarize the players with each other, but the details are often hard to come by. Many of the applications out there are painfully behind in interface areas forcing developers to use complicated "toolkits" which often lack the basics we need. Finding an analogy to easily explain even the basics to a customer is very difficult unless the front end jibes with the attempt.
The amount of confusion over what represents a good algorithm is also interesting. Take CAST, which seems a promising cipher and which we considered using over IDEA.
On asking 4 "experts" about CAST, I got 4 answers.
1> A 64 bit cipher with 40 bits secret. 2> A 64 bit cipher - not expected to be very complete. 3> A 128 bit cipher. 4> "Not worth discussing."
In fact, as I understand it, CAST is of variable key length (Up to 128 bits), and quite resistant to many attacks which plague DES and even IDEA.
But digging out that information was painfully difficult. (It may not even be correct).
http://adonis.ee.queensu.ca:8000/cast/cast.html Also http://www.entrust.com/library.htm [Caveat: I am not a cryptographer.] [...]
Still, these are areas that I wish c'punks would start looking at again.
Unfortunately, c'punks seems bogged down in macho fantasies about guns.
Even if strong unforfeited crypto is legal in the U.S., it will not be in other countries for quite some time.
There is strength in numbers, not just safety. The more crypto users there are, the less government, or anyone else, can do about it.
Hence the value of the "Crypto is Cool" approach. A valuable addition would be crypto packages designed for high school kids. All my many nieces and nephews are on the net... -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html