On Sunday, October 27, 2002, at 11:03 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
Thanks, but this still is not quite correct. The "coding" has in fact been discussed here on this list, or pointers given to it.
I was basing my statement solely on basis of what has come across this
list. Since you cited current and important work which has not been
visible to list participants I fully retract my statement, and apologize
for the cheap shot.
1. BitTorrent has been discussed several times. For example,
http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.2002.03.18-2002.03.24/ msg00285.html
Bram Cohen gave an update at a meeting last winter, then at CodeCon, then at the meeting last month.
2. PGP and the new release of PGP 8.0 by PGP Corporation have been discussed a few times. Jon Callas, Chief SomethingIForget at PGP Corporation, gave a presentation at the meeting on PGP directions and some details of PGP 8. There have also been discussions on the list.
3. Eric Blossom talked about the Software Defined Radio he and others, including Steve Schear, are working on. He also gave a demo of the radio at a Cypherpunks meeting last spring (also in Santa Cruz, coincidentally). This was discussed on the mailing list (someone even forwarded some announcements from a leading shortwave radio maker about their own version of a SDR).
4. Len Sassaman, who now is the main keeper of the MixMaster code, described the status of the code and features being added. I'm not sure how much of this gets currently discussed on the CP list, given that there's a separate remailer operators list which interested folks subscribe to. But remailers still get mentioned, and of course used, by folks on the list.
So, in these four areas real code is being generated. These get mentioned on the list...one just has to notice them, and remember.
My main point is to refute the defeatism that often is clothed in the language of cynicism and ennui. Much is still being done. It isn't getting the attention of the press, which is probably a good thing. (They have moved on to other topics. And nobody is being threatened with jail, so crypto is no longer as edgy as it was when PRZ was facing prosecution, when crypto exports were illegal, when Clipper was in the news.)
There was some other good code talked about. Mike Korns has a truly massive "agent" program running, doing data mining with live stock market data. While not strictly related to the main themes of Cypherpunks, he's a friend of mine and I invited him and his wife to the meeting, and then I invited him to give a brief talk (all of the talks were brief...all were held to a maximum of 15 minutes, to reduce droning and PowerPoint bullshit marketing slides). His system is a programming tour de force, IMO, based in a mix of C, LISP, and Javascript.
The role of agents and of complex systems in general in cypherpunkish digital economies is a fertile area. Logic, belief, and Bayesian reasoning are all candidates. (I gave a 10-minute talk on nonstandard logic, specifically some formalisms from Brouwer and Heyting, and connected it to propagation of belief. As in reputation systems, with some degree of transitivity in belief propagation.
As someone said to me later in the evening, he's been waiting for 10 years for crypto to turn to mathematical logic for ideas. Too soon to know if this is happening, but it's exciting.
(Regrettably, Dave Molnar could not be at the meeting, being that he was back at Harvard by the time of the meeting. He and Steve Schear had come out to my house a few weeks earlier and we'd had a good discussion of these topics. Dave also showed up at one of our informal Math Group evening meetings near Stanford, where several of us meet to talk about things like category theory.)
Anyway, the mantra "Cypherpunks write code" is more than just about writing Python scripts or C++ library modules. It is really about _building_ things. Sometimes with soldering irons, sometimes with compilers, sometimes even with words. People have different skills. Expecting them all to be C language experts is silly. Most of the best number theorists are not programmers at all...they have grad students and the like for that. And many of the best cryptographers are not number theorists. (I could go on about this for hours, about the absurdity of people who want to do crypto thinking they need to learn number theory! Even Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman knew essentially no number theory. One of them got the idea that maybe the difficulty of factoring could be used as the core for what they were doing...I have also heard that the idea came from another on the staff at MIT, but I won't get into that right now. Then they "crammed" and learned what they needed to learn about stuff like Euler's totient function, methods for finding primes, etc. It was enough.
Sorry for the digression. The point is that newcomers to crypto think they must learn number theory...nonsense. And they think they need to be a C++ expert...also nonsense.
Careful thought is what is needed most of all, especially now.
That's the best form of writing code.
--Tim Ma
