Cypherpunks write code & all that, gives James some brownie points.
The NSA wrote some great code. SELinux, hardened DES against DC (yes, yes, low keystrength). Helped standardise lots of primitives that seem to work well, too. I guess they're upstanding, awesome folk, those NSA guys. Nothing to complain about, cut 'em some slack. What's some fascism, racism and naked suicide-trolling when you've written good code ages ago, eh? A dick is still a dick, past accomplishments notwithstanding, and "don't feed the trolls" is still the first law of the 'net. Moving on. On 07/01/14 15:37, Patrick Mylund Nielsen wrote:
On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:50 AM, Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org> wrote:
Dont worry about James hyperbole, he's just channeling Tim May who was one of the three or four list co-founders, wrote the cyphernomicon [1], and had a habit of using that phrase 'needed killing' now and then, as I recall as phrase to express his distaste for someone's actions. Its an expression, not something literal... but James' black & white, non-PC, absolutist personality precludes him saying that :) You just have to read it with a USENET flame war mentality and parse for what he's actually saying.
Apart from the refusal to bow to PC, James is actually a pretty smart guy from what I recall. He implemented some simplifed UX, ECC crypto email stuff called 'crypto kong' [2] way back in 1997.
Cypherpunks write code & all that, gives James some brownie points.
History is littered with people who did remarkable things only to abuse the trust people placed in them to do horrible things. Writing some cool ECC crypto code does not preclude you from criticism when you show yourself to be someone who fantasizes about killing people. (Just look at all the creative ways he killed off people in the last thread! There was way too much imagination involved to be channeling anyone.)