At 01:11 PM 2/21/96 -0800, tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) wrote:

* Coderpunks -- number theory, DES, Haval, C/C++/Java, IETF and TCP/IP stuff, digital signatures, crypto libraries and APIs, Diffie-Hellman, BSAFE, RSAREF, etc.

* Cypherpunks -- nuclear bomb triggers, why women are more free under the will of Allah than in Western decadent societies, movie reviews, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Zimmermann, Zambian newspapers, alien bases in Antarctica, Himalayan treks, etc.

Pretty much, yep. The only part of this that really annoys me is that there isn't currently any real place to talk about actual crypto matters from a user's point of view. Sure, I can carve out space for myself on my own Web pages to talk about the things that interest/concern me - and I have - but it's tough to find anyplace to _learn_ in any way except random experimentation. And sure, if I could read C well enough to puzzle through the remailer code and had the UNIX knowledge necessary to compile and run one myself, for instance, I could answer all my questions about remailer operation. But I don't. And I wish I didn't have to. Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge gap between the tiny handful of people who create the stuff and the bulk of us who are merely interested in using it. At this point, I acknowledge that I'm reinventing Alan's screed about how "cypherpunks teach" should be as true as "cypherpunks write code". If more people don't work on bridging the aforementioned gap, smart people of good will who happen to be occupied enough with other things not to be able (or interested) to become themselves good programmers and cryptographers are SOL. -- Bruce Baugh bruce@aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce