It appears as if Tim May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
|
|On Sunday, April 28, 2002, at 10:02 AM, Adam Back wrote:
|
|> There are perhaps 20-30 news items worthy of comment per year and
|> discussion usually happens here so using traditional media news won't
|> achieve anything apart from wasting your time consuming typically
|> heavily biased, technically confused journalists produce cute sound
|> bites and generally mindlessly regurgitating the party line.
Argumentational analysis:
You only want to comment on ~ 20-30 news items per year.
People on this list usually discuss those items.
You feel you waste your time with traditional media.
You believe the news media people bias the news a lot.
You believe the journalists do not understand technology.
You notice they produce sound bites.
You view them as mindless minions of ``the party line''.
You don't like the message they deliver.
OK, so you don't like traditional media. Others might like them, however.
|Agreed. News is dominated by the theme du jour. This week it's the
|"news" that a lot of priests are homosexual pedophiles...yawn. Or it's
|the "news" that Arabs and Jews are still killing each other (not fast
|enough, IMO).
Argumentational analysis:
You don't like the traditional news media, either.
You notice that news media choose to not broadcast everything.
You note that this week they report on homosexual pedophile priests issue.
You don't care about that issue.
You note that they also report on Arabs and Jews killing each other.
You don't care about that issue, either.
You don't like neither Arabs nor Jews, anyway.
OK. People using a broadcast medium cannot send everything due to economics
in a market oriented capitalistic setting. If you don't interest yourself
for the issues, then I suggest you simply ignore the media. Your decision to
dislike these media appears irrational. Others might well find their reporting
relevant for _their_ interests.
|Sometimes some genuinely interesting news comes out, such as the news
|about the quark stars. But don't count on t.v. to cover it ("Tonight at
|11, those weird things the telescope guys have found!").
Most people don't care about QSR's. You do. You form a minority. As one, you
will find less mention of your interests in a market oriented economy. Stands
to reason.
I would suggest that people with minority views or interests simply put up
a web page with their interests, form web rings with other people sharings
their view or interests. Make the pages relevant for those who interest
themselves in these matters, and they will start to create a community.
Of course, that just might leave a lot of information about yourself on the
web, something some people like to avoid. I would suggest they create a few
'nyms, split the interest between the 'nyms, and put up the interesting pages
on different servers. Divide and conquer.
[...lots of your varying interests snipped...]
|Of the "crypto-related news" that _does_ get reported, most of it is a
|distraction from the real goals.
So, WHO distracts WHOM from WHOSE ``real goals''?
+ Ironically, the lack of new repressive
|crypto legislation is one of the several reasons crypto has become
|"tired," to used the "Wired" lingo. With Phil Z. not facing jail, with
|crypto exporters not facing espionage charges, with Bernstein relatively
|free to teach, and, most importantly, with Clipper and Mykotronx and all
|that rot no longer in the news, things have cooled down considerably. No
|wonder crypto companies are doing so poorly...Verisign down by 50% on
|Friday as just one example.
Quite possibly true. Western venture capitalists wants a fast buck.
+ With crypto being relegated to page D-42 of
|the newspaper, below the tennis scores, public and corporate "awareness"
|of crypto is almost gone completely. Crypto is not "sexy" the way it was
|in 1994, when using PGP was both a statement of solidarity with Phil and
|was a stick poked in the eye of Big Brother.
Why would people interested in crypto care about what Joe Sixpak thinks
about crypto? Do _you_ feel less interest in crypto when the media does not
paint you as a ``heroic'' fighter against U.S. government?
|(And today, post 911, we have ostensible libertarians arguing for Big
|Brother controls on thought and writing. Using PGP is now seen by many
|as unpatriotic. "What have you got to hide?")
Correction: *Previous* libertarians.
They have apparently changed their minds.
|My problem with the "cypherpunks write code" mantra has long been that
|it is used indiscriminately, often by people who haven't themselves
|written anything of note. (Doesn't apply to Adam, obviously.)
|
|The flavor of the sentiment is lost when people think it means "don't
|think about where to go, just start hacking Perl!"
The ``cypherpunks write code'' definition apparently defines a hard core.
The rest merely act as cypherpunks groupies.
PERL has its uses. You can naturally write a crypto package in it, as in
any Turing complete language. However, some people encounter a mental block
against using PERL, since it does not remind of their favourite computer
programming language, like C, PASCAL, Intercal, or whatever.
|Fact is, very, very few things have actually been coded. Fact is, we're
|still mired at the conceptual level of 1977, with RSA. (And with some
|list members debating how to generate random numbers, a subject that was
|old 20 years ago and that is of essentially no significance for the
|goals which many of us mostly support.) Little of the interesting crypto
|of the mid-to-late-80s is implemented in code...it's as if time stopped
|in 1980.
Either (a) people stopped hacking crypto code in 1980,
(b) the governments silently approached those that did, and
gave them deal they could not resist,
(c) people don't understand crypto code and hack something easier,
or (d) something else.
Do you have any hypothesis as to the reason why?
|Here we are, ten years after the start of Cypherpunks, with basically a
|*less* usable PGP, to most casual users, than we had in 1992 (because
|of fragmentation, a tower of Babel set of non-commutable versions,
|battles over commercial vs. noncommercial versions, and creeping
|featuritus), and with very little else in the Cypherpunks Canon.
|
|Where are the systems we expected to see?
A disappointed old man who has lost his illusions of an easy victory
should avoid telling, as his pessimism will infect some of the young,
and thus make the old man's defaitistic predictions a reality. Anyways,
nobody likes a whiner. ;-)
[...lots of nostalgia snipped...]
|But it's clear that the excitement in the air during the early years has
|subsided. Related to this, I hear strong rumors that "Wired" may cease
|publication, that the owners of "Wired" have gotten "tired" of its low
|profitability. (One can only hope that a further implosion of the
|magazine business happens. Two hundred computer weeklies and monthlies,
|mostly filled with advertising and breathless articles. Who really reads
|"Oracle 8DBMI World, the Magazine for Oracle 8DMI Enterprise Solutions
|Users"?
Who cares? Let the readers of the magazines vote with their wallets.
[...moby mumblage snipped...]
|How could this stuff possibly relate to Cypherpunks themes?
|
|First, it may not, directly. [...]
Littering in a public mailing list. Pay your fines to the clerk. NEXT!
|Second, I believe that topos theory is very likely the proper theory to
|use to analyze systems of agents acting with incomplete or non-absolute
|information. (This is a point that Smolin and Taylor, as well as several
|of the category theorists and toposophers, have made, that topos theory
|is more than about abstract sets...it's the logic of time-varying sets,
|of "Heyting algebras" in place of "Boolean algebras," and of situations
|where the law of the excluded middle, "A or Not-A," is not used. And
|it's the theory to use with "micro universes," universes created out of
|axioms and other seeds. The parallels with cypherspace and complex
|systems are there.)
Never tell people about what you _will_ do.
Tell them what you _have_ done.
So when you have done some real work on the matter, at least written some
paper on the stuff, and published it, you may well write about it here.
At a bare minimum, write a web page on the stuff, and ask people to have
some comments on it. Until such time, you simply add to the useless noise.
|This belief I have that topos theory is the right tool to analyze these
|systems is probably controversial...and I may be the only person on the
|planet today with some knowledge of both domains (crypto protocols and
|topos theory) and who has looked at things this way. Which is exciting
|in and of itself.
Delusions of grandeur can help you if you use as a source of energy to
do things you wouldn't otherwise. Otherwise, you only pat your own back.
|Pigging out on this stuff is what makes my life interesting. Your
|mileage may vary.
Matthew (the) X probably feel the same rush.
