On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 4:57 PM, Jacob Appelbaum <[email protected]> wrote: > While I think Maxim is viewed as exceedingly harsh in how he writes, I > think that your response is really the wrong way to deal with him. We > should consider that his cultural background is different and that as > far as I understand it, he isn't a native english speaker. Between the > two things, perhaps we might just ask him to be nicer?
I am often harsh because I dislike circlejerks. Activists are too often completely unable to employ critical thinking when the result of that thinking would go contrary to their ideology — even more so when said activists lack scientific/technical education. E.g., recall that case last year where legal activists on this list finally succeeded in (or at least supported, not sure) enhancing export controls of software [1]. I was as annoyed as you, but I wasn't surprised. This is what these people do: claim they support some idea (e.g., freedom to write software), but easily do something to the contrary when the result is not aligned with their ideology. There is no critical thinking involved — nothing in their life accustomed these people to the need to think critically. Anyway, back to the topic. I don't care much about Cryptocat, simply because I don't care much about web programming. I don't think I participated in a discussion about Cryptocat previously. I did converse with Nadim when he was going to do something stupid in the project once, but got tired quickly when he found it hard to grasp simple CS concepts. So he fixed the problem, and I stopped caring, fine. But in this thread, I pointed out something very simple: Cryptocat paid for professional peer review (audit, whatever you call it), and it didn't work. Then, people start to lecture me for some reason, as if I have any reason to listen to that chatter. Did Cryptocat contact Veracode for a response? I mean, they spent CIA money on that, no? Or was that money spent just to be able to write a rosy blog post? E.g., I thought about hiring their audit services as well before — is that a bad idea? Is the value in such an audit only in being able to convince people who don't understand anything about programming? So, say, clueless people got happy due to an audit, and Cryptocat people were forced to fix a bug due to someone finding and widely publishing it — I can understand that. So, where are the answers to these questions? Why am I reading useless apologies and expressions of support instead? [1] https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2012-September/004854.html -- Maxim Kammerer Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected] or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
