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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

Unless you're a gunsmith, it's not really comparable. Anyone with a sufficiently-powerful desk calculator can use illegal encryption, but not everyone can procure an illegal firearm.

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Don't call encryption illegal. That's letting them shape the narrative.

Isn't the whole point that they're trying to make mathematics illegal? To my knowledge, encryption is currently legal.

To those who say "it's impossible to make encryption illegal": there have been sillier laws. George Orwell once imagined a society where 2+2=5 was a law. While they usually do, laws don't have to make sense.

My favourite example in the world of "silly" laws - Saudi Arabia invests massive money in scientific research, and still executes people for Sorcery and Witchcraft

We don't need to look to fiction in the US to see examples of encryption controlled by the State with laws, it was literally US government policy in the 90s/early 2000s. Examples include banning export of encryption keys longer than 40 bits etc to make it easier for US secret services to crack the foreign purchaser's systems, the debate during the Clinton administration on what should be permitted encryption-wise was intense at times.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

You should look into the so called ghost guns that show up. It hasn't been easier to get one, whether from assembling a kit to 3d printing to finding plans to build one from scrap.

It's still hard. I couldn't go out and make a gun right now. Meanwhile, many children have invented their own codes and ciphers by age 10, armed only with paper and pencil and the desire to keep a secret. A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that "hey, maybe asymmetric encryption is possible" and the knowledge that (F_p \ {0}, ×) is a group.

> A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that

And I bet the NSA would break your homegrown RSA built with your basic understanding of group theory in a few minutes. RSA is extremely subtle to implement correctly and if you get it wrong you can easily leak everything.

Unlikely. The hard part of implementing RSA is making it secure against timing attacks, but I doubt my desk calculator and I will be particularly vulnerable to that. It's not like I'm going to suffer from the ECB penguin issue: MY MSGZ R SMOL and my key size is large enough to avoid that.

RSA really is very simple group theory. It was independently invented at least three times, as I recall.

Outside of the USA you can't simply order gun parts or ammunition without a licence. You'd have to manufacture everything yourself. That's a lot harder than simply 3D printing a lower receiver.

Also that gun would be useless for any legal purpose. You'd be prosecuted even if you used it to defend yourself.

While true, the post I was responding to claimed you needed to be a gunsmith. That simply isn't true anymore.

> Also that gun would be useless for any legal purpose

Also irrelevant, given that the topic is illegal firearms.

You pretty much need to be a gunsmith to create a reliable weapon that won't jam and won't explode in your face. In most countries you can't order weapon parts online - all load-bearing parts are regulated. You can't manufacture those without gunsmithing skills and equipment.

This is why criminals prefer to smuggle industrially manufactured illegal guns from somewhere else instead of making them at home.

Gun laws don't prevent someone from making shitty homemade guns. They prevent them from getting properly made ones. Accessing gun smuggling networks isn't that easy without connections to the criminal underworld.

I looked up Luty's homemade firearms. He claimed that they can be manufactured by anyone. But that's obviously not true. He definitely had good metalworking skills. I certainly would not be able to manufacture anything like that at home.

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