False statement: "Since cypherpunks no longer code"

[Tim May]

(I have no idea why Extropy and Transhumantech are being copied on this message (<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, extropy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>). Since I know they will bounce my reply, as I am not subscribed to their lists, I will delete them from the distribution.)


On Sunday, October 27, 2002, at 02:20 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:

Political decisions could kill the demand driving development. Cheapest
way for the fringe is to inform and develop countermeasures. Since
cypherpunks no longer code, spreading information should have priority.

This is a false statement. A cheap shot, in fact. I will stack the code written by attendees of the recent CP meetings against your code, Eugene, any day. (No offense, Eugene, but I despise these "fashionable" cheap shots which miss the mark so...cheaply.)

At the last Cypherpunks meeting, which happened to be at my house, we saw excellent examples of coding on several important fronts: BitStorm, Software-Defined Radio, the new release of PGP, and Mixmaster. Major new examples of coding on all three main fronts: crypto, remailers, peer-to-peer, and the recent addition of SDR, which promises to blow the roof off of attempts by governments to ban listening at certain frequencies.

I realize it has become fashionable in this post-fin-de-siecle era of ennui to jabber about how boring things have become, but people are still coding. Granted, there are fewer "new and surprising" apps, but this is completely to be expected. We had a very good idea of the classes of apps as long ago as 1990, and the first half of the 1990s saw several very good realizations of most of them.

CodeCon, earlier this year, was a smashing success.

--Tim May


--Tim May
"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone
with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later
convinces himself." -- David Friedman