On 27 Jun 2000, Anonymous wrote:
> So we see things like "Freedom", "Harmless Little Project" -- trying
> to use persuade the governments to propose "banning freedom".
yes, the word "free" has good connotations. After a while, though,
it fails the collision detection test. The data haven project I am
working on is called Free Haven. When trying to talk about it in the
same breath as Freenet and Freedom, occasionally things become confused.
what is the status of the harmless little project these days, btw?
>
> Then we have names like Dan Farmer's "Satan" -- a tool for detecting
> system vulnerabilities, presumably by the system owner, but
> potentially by third parties with intent of cracking systems.
also flaunting authority. at least appearing to. See "Back Orifice" as
a slightly more extreme example in this vein. or any big metal band
(Black Sabbath, anyone?)
still, who does this shock, anymore?
>
> But then napster and gnutella have really natty dumb sounding names,
> but seem to be popular enough.
Napster, if you believe the hype, was the original programmer's nickname.
No idea where Gnutella came from. Not every name is engineered.
Whatever happened to all those companies making a living off of thinking
up new names for products?
I saw an article by Lenstra recently (maybe forwarded to cypherpunks; I
skimmed it, saved it, and moved on). The point was that cryptographic
engineering is going to become free of performance constraints, thanks to
cheap and abundant computation. Cryptography will be EVERYwhere!
and nothing at all will change. Because still no one will know how to use
it properly, or what to expect from programs that say they are "secure."
Thinking about "security" is not something most of us grew up with, and so
we don't have much of an intuition about what works and what doesn't.
(have you ever been driving in a country which has only had cars widely
available since the 1960s or so?)
In the same vein, I am looking forward to the day when we don't need to
think about specifically "cypherpunk" names for projects, because the
service that they provide will be something that everyone wants,
cypherpunk or not. Take a look at MP3 distribution or "library
integration" as Fred Hapgood frames it. Dealing with the fallout from the
first systems, the ones which don't protect anonymity, is going to keep
people busy for a while...but very few of them, I suspect, will call
themselves "cypherpunks."
and nothing at all will change.
Because still people will argue over the "ethics" and "moral
consequences" and whatnot of these systems, and they'll still be named by
chance, in an attempt to evoke some deeply held conviction, or after the
original author's cat.
-dmolnar
