Comped scribblers the bane of conferences

[Tim May]

On Saturday, August 25, 2001, at 06:52 PM, dmolnar wrote:

> [on the PET 2002 workshop]
>> I'm skeptical. I haven't looked in detail at this one, but the one
>> Choate forwarded twice to the list was filled with corporate folks on
>> the committees. (Some of whom used to be list subscribers. Fine folks,
>> I'm sure, but now it's a corporate task for them to on committees.)
>
> I think that all three refer to the same workshop.
>
> I'm not sure I understand this comment, though. Do you think that the
> committee members are doing it solely because it's a "corporate task"
> which they have been ordered to do? or that they've lost interest in the
> research now that it is a "corporate task"  to be on the program
> committee? What exactly is the problem with "corporate folks"?
>
> I can't claim to speak for the committee members. From what I know of 
> the
> co-chairs, however, they are not doing this simply because it is a
> "corporate task." Both of them have been interested in this area for as
> long as I've known them. As far as I can tell, their interest is 
> genuine.

My point maybe didn't come across as clearly as it could (hey, even 
typing fast, it's a lot of work to make all points come out clearly, and 
the more I write, the more chance for unclear sections).

The core technologies for "P.E.T." are basically what we've talking 
about, coding, and using for close to the past 10 years. Little is 
coming out of corporations. Even less from academia.

More I started to write on this, but have deleted. If people want to 
hear the German academics talk about privacy technology, fine. Frankly, 
having been at my share of all-day Cypherpunks meetings, I doubt a 
1.5-day workshop on what are essentially Cypherpunks tools is going to 
accomplish much.

(What might? Putting several of the main architects of competing systems 
like Freedom, Mojo, Morpheus, Mixmaster, etc. together in a room with 
plenty of blackboards, a lot of beer, and some folks like Lucky, Wei 
Dai, Hal Finney, and others to hash out some of the tough issues and 
maybe catalyze some breakthroughs. Looking at the topics, I see the 
likely paper contributors will be academics and corporate 
ladder-climbers.)

>
> Now, it *is* being run as a straight-up academic workshop, with
> Springer-Verlag proceedings, refereed papers, and that whole nine yards.
> This has certain disadvantages. Long lead times between genesis of an 
> idea
> and publication (not to *mention* implementation), for one. Arguably too
> much emphasis on theory and citations rather than just "cypherpunks 
> write
> code," for another. You can go after it on those grounds (and we can 
> argue
> about that for another four or five messages if you want), but that 
> seems
> to be distinct from talking about "corporate folks" on the program
> committee -- have I missed something?

This point you raise fits in closely with the names on the program list.

As with Financial Cryptography and Information-Hiding, the field has 
become sort of "respectable." So now we have the Dutch Data Protection 
Authority and the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection and some 
universities represented so well.

(It's actually just part of the sham of these conferences. These are not 
conferences where innovative _research_ is discussed. These are places 
where somebody's particular twist on other ideas, ideas which would 
barely rate a thread here on these mailing lists, is puffed out into an 
academic-looking paper.)

>
> It's my hope that workshops like this will help attract smart people to
> work on the problems in remailers, implementing digital cash, and other
> fun Cypherpunkish topics. People who've never even heard of 
> "Cypherpunks,"
> and who would otherwise go off and do number theory or something else.


Look, people not already involved in this area won't spend $$$ going 
early to SF and paying for this workshop. You'll likely get some drones 
from Motorola and Intel who convince their bosses that this sounds 
important, and you'll get some Feds and other spooks who go to get up to 
speed on what to look for.

If you think this is "outreach" for Cypherpunks, where are the 
Cypherpunks on the program committee. I count one, maybe 1.5 if Lance is 
still doing this stuff (last I heard, he wasn't, and he hasn't posted 
here in a very, very long time). The rest are academics and staid 
corporate types. I'll bet they'll quash any papers dealing with using 
crypto to undermine governments.

It sounds pretty creepy to me. No doubt a lot of journalists will cover 
it. Most of them comped, no doubt.

--Tim May