Cypherpunks response to viral stimuli

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Mon Feb 2 17:23:02 PST 2004


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Five or ten years ago, when the Feds were still pretending to be in
control of crypto, crypto enthusiasts were still a threat - these days you
can pick up VPN boxes at the grocery store, and if they still care about
us, they're more likely to be interested in content and the identities of
active posters than in the identity of lurkers.   They can observe a lot
just by looking, or they can announce a sale on tinfoil hats and see who
responds, or ask a Stupid Newbie Question and see who flames them, or
forge a message about Guns from a Usual Suspect and see who claims that
theirs is bigger, or post about something tangential like how to stop spam
(which has pretty much replaced libertarianism and censorship as the
all-consuming discussion topic on the net.)
Viruses and Web Bugs are less likely to be useful for detecting
Cypherpunks (or Mac users, or Linux users) than for detecting the general
public - to some  extent we may be smarter about that, or at least
grumpier about HTML mail, plus some of the cpunks nodes filter out that
sort of thing.  But perhaps they're exploiting that stack overflow bug in
PGP 2.6.2 instead.
<<attachment GoodTimes.txt was deleted by RoboVirusBlocker>>
<<attachment echelon.scr was deleted by RoboVirusBlocker>>
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