Return of the death of cypherpunks.

[Tyler Durden]

I don't agree.

One thing we do know is that, although Crypto is available and, in special 
contexts, used, it's use in other contexts is almost counterproduct, sending 
up a red flag so that those that "Protect Our Freedoms" will come sniffing 
around and bring to bear their full arsenal of technologies and, possibly, 
dirty tricks. Merely knowing that you are using stego/crypto in such 
contexts can cause a lot of attention come your way, possibly in actual 
meatspace, which in many cases is almost worse than not using crypto at all

In addition, although strong and "unbreakable" Crypto exists, one thing a 
stint on Cypherpunks teaches you is that it is only rarely implemented in 
such a way as to actually be unbreakable to a determined attacker, 
particularly if there are not many such cases to examine in such contexts.

The clear moral of this story is that, to increase the odds of truly secure 
communication, etc, Crypto in such contexts must become much more 
ubiquitous, and I still think Cypherpunks has a role to play there and 
indeed has played that role. Such a role is, of course, far more than a mere 
cheerleading role,a fact that merits a continued existence for Cypherpunks 
in some form or another.

-TD






Only when Crypto is used ubiquitousl

>From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
>To: cypherpunks at jfet.org
>Subject: Return of the death of cypherpunks.
>Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 12:09:36 -0700
>
>     --
>From:           	Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
> > While I don't exactly know why the list died, I
> > suspect it was the fact that most list nodes offered a
> > feed full of spam, dropped dead quite frequently, and
> > also overusing that "needs killing" thing (okay, it
> > was funny for a while).
> >
> > The list needs not to stay dead, with some finite
> > effort on our part (all of us) we can well resurrect
> > it. If there's a real content there's even no need
> > from all those forwards, to just fake a heartbeat.
>
>Since cryptography these days is routine and
>uncontroversial, there is no longer any strong reason
>for the cypherpunks list to continue to exist.
>
>I recently read up on the Kerberos protocol, and
>thought, "how primitive".  Back in the bad old days, we
>did everything wrong, because we did not know any
>better.  And of course, https sucks mightily because the
>threat model is both inappropriate to the real threats,
>and fails to correspond to the users mental model, or to
>routine practices on a wide variety of sites, hence
>users glibly click through all warning dialogs, most of
>which are mere noise anyway.
>
>These problems, however, are no explicitly political,
>and tend to be addressed on lists that are not
>explicitly political, leaving cypherpunks with little of
>substance.
>
>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      AnKV4N6f9DgtOy+KkQ9QsiXcpQm+moX4U09FjLXP
>      4zfMeSzzCXNSr737bvqJ6ccbvDSu8fr66LbLEHedb