Time for a return of the Cypherpunks, Crypto-Anarchists & Techno-Libertarians?
jroller.com
jroller.com
I suppose we all see what we want to see.
I do wish that there existed a forum for some of the discussions that used to actually happen on the cypherpunks list (even though it would frequently derail into arguments about assasination markets, and paranoid conspiracy theories).
OK, fair point about bitcoin. But other than that, I really feel like the cypherpunk types have been fairly invisible lately. Maybe it's just that there was a certain period of time, back in the /. heyday, when discussions of cryptography, surveillance, data-havens, etc. were at a peak, and now they've leveled off. But in any case, I would argue that we (still) need an active and efficient cypherpunk community to promote technological freedom.
The problem with crypto-currency isn't the "crypto", it's the "currency". I think that same phenomena is the culprit for most "cyperpunk-related" discussions.
10 years ago I'd have said that I was really hoping for the "Star Trek" future, but that if I was forced to bet, I'd bet on a "BladeRunner" future being way more likely.
Now I'm old, and I think if I was forced to bet, "Brazil" is a more likely model (the movie, not the country).
But I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing the value of a healthy "cypherpunk" community. I think you can look at a lot of things that came out of the original community and see value there.
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/3199/inforn.jpg
Another image I can't locate showed how we used to see the future, from a 1980's standpoint (think: Jetsons), and how we see it today (think: "The Road", "Book of Eli" or "I am Legend").
I think you must mean a 1960s standpoint. 1980s gave us Bladerunner and Terminator.
The movie The Terminator was at probably partially inspired by the short story Second Variety, written by Philip K Dick in 1953.
I'm afraid you may be right. But I still hold out some hope that we can do better than that.
Crypto solutions lead to technical complexity which in turn raises the barrier to entry and makes it difficult for outsiders to join in. It's some kind of isolationist community. Who uses Diaspora, anyway? Anyone? Doesn't it offer precisely what everyone's allegedly in need of?
check out the bitcoin forums. Honestly, I think the op has been hiding under a rock for the past couple years. Bitcoin and tor are great examples, but there are plenty of other disruptive projects out there, like loom, open-transactions, ripple. Crypto-anarchists didn't go away, they got to work creating practical applications that can change people's lives, and not just for the geeks.
You may find some interested people in UK Crypto (but obviously I'm not suggestion you spam their list). (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/ukcrypto)
> This group is comprised of people with a professional interest in the formulation and content of UK government policy on the provision, use and control of encryption products and services in the UK. It was formed in response to the 1996 announcement of UK policy on the provision of encryption services on telecommunications networks.
> The mailing list is unmoderated, but only subscribed members can post. Please try and restrict postings to UK Encryption law and try not to stray onto general cryptology topics.
I'm not a cryptographer by any means, but my first thought when reading that is can we make non-terrible in-browser javascript crypto?
(Copied from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872007)
;)
Which is that it sounds rather complicated (which makes my security-sense go off, but certainly isn't a fatal indictment) and that I'd really need to either do an active evaluation of the system or get several reassurrances that someone else decent (ideally someone much smarter than me) did and it checked out before I'd be remotely comfortable using it or recommending it.
Data-dependent timings could conceivably allow a bad guy to deduce something about the data being sent.
Note that this is all highly speculative; I'm not convinced it's truly impossible, but it's one of those attack scenarios where "put a gun to the sysadmin's head" begins to look like a pleasant and trouble-free option...
What? How does the machine -the machine not connected to the network- get the results off Amazon?
Say, a signed webapp manifest, listing all files that are supposed to be used in that context and their hashes. On first execution, the associated key is stored, maybe compared with third party knowledge about the site (not tampered with) and key (known not-trustworthy).
After that, you know when someone else than the maintainer tampered with the code.
With that you're down to trusting the maintainer. Which makes it as good as any other code distribution scheme.
Is it worse than nothing, or just bad?
What alternatives would you suggest?
Some people are of the opinion that the usefulness of being able to do crypto in people's browsers outweighs exactly how inhospitable it is. I don't share this opinion.
In most circumstances, something bad might be preferable to nothing at all. I think crypto is one of the rare exceptions where "bad" is actually worse than none.
My alternative suggestions are conservative: PGP and TLS
These suggestions aren't particularly exciting, however, so people keep looking for other, newer, ones.
I'm actually in the small minority of security people who don't think it's feasible to discourage people from trying to muck around with crypto. It's like sitting a kid in front of a television,handing them a video game controller, and then telling them not to play video games.
Crypto is an attractive nuisance. It also seems like it answers a lot of our problems (it actually answers far less than we think, and just creates new ones in their place), so people naturally are inclined to experiment with it.
So I hope someday to be wrong about crypto in the browser, because it'd be great. But right now, it's sort of like trying to fancy up a glory hole.
There's the remaining problem of key management, though for many people, browser-based password managers are a reasonable mechanism.
PGP/GPG and TLS still provide key management issues (with several notable registrar incidents in the past year). And even if you're, say, parking a public key on a site to autoencrypt material sent there (assuming it's not encrypted prior to upload), there's the question of how you're going to interact with encrypted data on that site. I see three basic options: server-side encrypt/decrypt, browser-based, or client-side non-browser utilities. In the latter case, you now have a wide range of environments (Windows variants, Mac, Linux, etc.) to support.
Not saying it can't happen, but good crypto is hard.
Even the pros (PGP) ended up using a server-based solution which had both public and private keys on it as their solution to the key-management problem.
Something like this is the ONLY way I can see crypto in the browser gain any credibility and traction. Crypto in the JS is not only potentially the easiest attack vector, it's also abhorrently slow. With native browser constructs we get access to safe(r) implementations which cannot be DOM manipulated, MITMed or simply replaced at load time. We get access to speed boosts by running natively and on hardware supporting AESNI it can zoom.
People on the internet don't seem to have trouble speaking out about all sorts of other things.
I think the issues which are fundamental to the cypherpunk ethos (if such a thing can be said to exist‡) just aren't things most people care about. And you can totally make a valid argument that this will pretty much ensure that the worst-case scenario is the one that will come to pass (if you are so inclined).
But I don't get the impression that there's this large contingent of people who are actually interested in this who aren't participating because they're worried. I'd love to be wrong though, as that would mean that there could be a much more lively and productive community to swell up.
‡ although this is as good a stab at it as any: http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.t...
Could be. And that's a pretty sad thought, given that we (those of us in the USA anyway) live in a country where "free speech" has traditionally been one of the most fundamental and cherished principles.
Most of the time the jargon of technology upsets the cognitive sensibilities of the layperson. At the same time, negative feedback to the presentation of one's technical views generally determines a depressive curve in one's perceived value of one's abilities.
This is why khanacademy.com, coursera.com et al. are becoming successfully: the technology _is enabling_ general audience to see the posterchildren of our industry. We are expected to not simply learn from their exams, but are at once being forced to adopt a teaching method. They're talking about what we are supposed to already know. Are they doing it better? Their demonstrations are tests of our capacities as contributors to society a al Google, all the way down to overworked Java veteran. Your debt to society is the repetition of your reputation. You'd rather be talking about optimization than sitcoms anyway, and most people are talking about sitcoms or Facebook. As social media blurs the line between what is on "TV" and what is on "the screen," those in the know will more readily experience the curse of knowledge. It supplies a baseline for conversation, for one: one is able to engage in demonstration and dialectic, which is antagonistic to idle conversation. It's constant what one's professing of one's Web-enabled escapades outlines a narrative pre-established by user interface workflows and business and advertisement initiatives. Constantly does this run through the minds of rational technophobists. And we are fast approaching a reality where passive adoption of the narrative of another as regards one's Internet identity sharply delineates character of lifestyle, more readily than simply wearing a certain manner of garment or having certain sense of taste. One is deciding on a question of openness, the last vestige of autonomy. Our opinions, then, I believe rest on principles of assessment for qualities of openness: organized openness, informed openness, civil openness.
A society can be "open" where information in general may be a clutter of human desire, -- or an organized system of thought. Many question the "aesthetic" of technologists, the ethos. How much of that have we mismanaged, or is simply outside of our control, in a world rife with political disorganization and corruption? It is now easy for anyone to cook up Hitler-esque ethical quandaries against groups of programmers who only want to experiment with people, as Spinoza would put it, "as it follows from the nature of a triangle." We are seeing it now: the social risk of projects like Google Glass, tacocopter.com, etc. This is our experiment style, and now humans are the experiment.
Most people in developed countries are practicing hedonism. What more do you expect from the rest, in a world full of free info on how to compile apache or use beef and cheap Amazon supercomputers?
All of the articles cited are indeed about civil liberties, but I don't see them as being problems that can necessarily be improved by developing better cryptography.
The social network propaganda isn't so much of a technological problem as a social one -- people assume that everyone's using social networks in a straightforward way, to express themselves and connect with friends, even though they have the capacity to be used in many other ways, including deceptively.
The NSA email-hoarding thing is also a social problem -- encryption exists, it's just that nobody uses it.
The "pre-crime screening" appears to be a statistical model. I don't yet know if there's a science of counter-machine-learning -- that is, creating examples that are hard for models to classify, analogously to making harder and harder CAPTCHAs. If government gets better at data science, what civil libertarians will need is not better encriptions, but different techniques designed to protect against statistical intrusions.
Likewise, I don't think better crypto is in any straightforward way a protection against biometrics or government bills to take down certain websites.
If he's saying "we need more libertarians and people concerned about civil liberties," then he's right. But I'm not even sure there are fewer than there used to be (look at the backlash to SOPA). I just suspect think there was a time when people had more hope in purely technological fixes to government abuses. I know some old-time crypto-anarchists, and they're largely disappointed with how things have turned out. In the end, preventing the abuse of government power is a hard problem, and it looks less likely that a small set of tech breakthroughs will suddenly make civil liberties violations obsolete.
I don't care to spend time advocating techno-libertarian positions (that I agree with), just to see a larger mass of piracy people [mis] using the same words (e.g. freedom, rights, etc.) to try to justify a position that I personally find abhorrent.
if the list ends up being for "crypto to avoid paying taxes so the poor die as darwin wanted" then sure, i wouldn't join. but i think there's a clear need for a unified voice on crypto and online rights.
worse, i think you are doing this a disservice, in that you're implying that these rights are only important for your group of people. these rights are important for all of us. even metal-head libertarians.
incidentally, i would also encourage people to donate to eff - almost all the free gifts they give you for donating are horrible, but the hat pin is actually really nice. so go buy a $100 dollar hat pin and help spread some good.
The thing about privacy is, you don't know what end it does serve. I personally am a Libertarian (and a metal-head, yes, although I'm getting too old for a lot of moshing and shit), but I certainly advocate for privacy rights independently of any other Libertarian position. If I'm using crypto to discuss my beliefs about ending tax-payer subsidized entitlement programs, others may simultaneously be using it to discuss their desire to raise taxes, end all private property and redistribute wealth "to each according to his need."
but i think there's a clear need for a unified voice on crypto and online rights.
Yes, this is one area where Libertarians and most left-leaning types can find some common ground.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a curmudgeon, but what I'm basically saying is that there are a lot of people out there arguing for inane positions, and it's drowning and/or cancelling out the people arguing for good positions. And just generally makes their lives less enjoyable.
Yes, I think that is very true. That's why I think two of the goals of a modern cypherpunk movement should be to: A. educate people on how to use encryption and related tools, and B. work on making tools that are simpler to use / easier to understand in the first place.
There are not many people who can lucidly translate the understanding of technology's issues into the language of non-techies. It's not sufficient to be technically correct: it's required that the presentation works as well.
Techies seem to have allergies to other cultures that don't have similar value systems and have largely failed in translating our concerns to the broader world. The old word 'luser' adequately explains our shortcoming.
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-...
Very true. And simply raising awareness of that point itself, is a valuable thing. That said, there are (or were) actual skilled professionals, with the knowledge to create new crypto schemes, etc. in the cypherpunk community. But clearly not everyone falls into that bucket.
Eventually, everything has to be open. I wouldn't trust a company with 100% of my data that wasn't. However, there is 10% I would trust with a company like mine today, assuming I got benefits in other areas, and that's where we are starting.
A few good references: https://www.calyxinstitute.org/ and https://crypto.is/ | threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/behind-scenes-crypto-project-083011
We are rebuilding crypto.is and moving the site to other servers, we'll be back soon, you can find us at irc.oftc.net #cryptodotis
Get in touch if you'd like to be invited.
I'd rather see security and cryptography packaged so it can be widely used by normal app developers, vs. relying on privacy/security aficionados to do everything.
Maybe they joined the Pirate Party?
Here on HN the down vote seems to be deployed for disagreement, even against well written comments that include substantiation.
Fortunately, Libertarianism is far more mainstream now, even if the Ron Paul movement has managed to dilute it to some extent.
I think that may be inherent to making anything more mainstream. It's useful to have people who remain attached to the core ideology of a movement, but getting things done generally requires working with other people. If the Ron Paul movement brings a bunch of people to libertarianism then other libertarians should support it, even if Ron Paul is pretty far from their idea of the ideal libertarian candidate.
I'm the creator and moderator of /r/ronpaul. In my observation, the idea of voting based on quality rather than agreement is entirely absent from larger political subreddits. People vote to promote their side and are particularly likely to vote that way in a fight that has degenerated in to name calling when the ideal situation would be downvotes for all involved.
Around here I see a lot of libertarians, unless my perception is somehow skewed. I certainly feel left of the HN mainstream, anyway, though it's not a monolithic community. (My own take on crypto-anarchism and cypherpunk is more a skepticism of organized power in general, whether it's a state, corporation, or religion, which is a bit different from libertarianism per se.)
but in all seriousness, I think out of the three, libertarianism is the only one that claims to be borne out of stable and unchanging "priciples" regarding individual freedom. By doing this, libertarians often invite criticism because of the bold claim that their position is based on principles, which implies it can withstand -- indeed would welcome -- being taken to its logical extreme. But the extreme is pretty much anarchy and is easy to criticize, considering that all developed countries HAVE governments -- typically in some form of republic. Collective action problems such as pollution of a commons or driving on a highway require some enforcement. And thus libertarians, by touting "principles", invite argument about extreme implementations of those principles. When in reality, many people who lean libertarian are probably looking at the other side of the bell curve where there are diminishing returns from regulation.
That said, I want to emphasize that distributed systems on the internet do work better than centralized systems -- and I am passionate about that, so in some sense I am a libertarian myself! But internet servers typically coexist peacefully and thus do not require centralized enforcement of laws to protect them from each other.
Every developed country also has a single payer healthcare system (and now the US is joining them). The reason is that the public wants EVERYONE to have access to basic education and EVERYONE to have access to basic healthcare, regardless of income level. And they can collectively bargain better when there is a single payer. A free market actually results in higher prices. To be fair, by having so much power when negotiating with healthcare/education providers, the public needs to take care lest they stifle investment and innovation in those sectors. There is some central planning (with respect to budgets and allocation) that takes place now. But on the whole, having these services be cheaper for the public is a big advantage when needed, such as when there are more poor people.
As a result, there are certain regulations for schools that are paid for by public money. There has been a lot of action in our area (and I suspect around the US) about opening charter schools. These are schools that are funded with public money but are not subject to all the regulations that public schools are, and can take innovative approaches. For obvious reasons, they are different from private schools.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school
This is where you could use vouchers to send your kids. They still have to do things like have adequate transportation, serve certain groups of minorities, help underprivileged kids, and so forth.
However, I do agree with you in that I don't think there is much support in the US Constitution for a Federal Department of Education.
Well, there's quite a bit of overlap. Even "big-L Libertarians", meaning those who belong to the Libertarian Party in the US, are not infrequently actually free-market anarchists.
Couple that with the Libertarian love of gold as a currency and you have even more of the worst of the 19th Century in that political ideology.
As for gold, I suggest you study the history of money, and economics while you're at it, and pay particularly close attention to the predictions and results of those "libertarian economists", the austrians. It was Mises himself who was laughed at by his fellow austrians when he predicted the Nazis would occupy the country a year hence, only to be proven right. It was also Mises who predicted the great depression and its cause, prior to it happening. Personally, I made out like a bandit during the housing boom, and bubble, and bursting, all due to being tipped off by the Mises Institute that one was coming, as far back as 2001. So, go ahead and be smug about gold while the monetary base has gone vertical. What threat can you be to libertarians when the market has proven us right (and continues to do so)?
Seriously, though, your comment is a bunch of assertions, much like mine above. Alas, in the end I made an argument because I'm seemingly incapable of responding without making an argument.
There really is no point to posting the things you did about libertarianism. Libertarians have heard these claims before, and since they're not really honest (and can't be, because reality is far more complex than that) the only real point to them is either to start conflict or to signal to others.
Libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle. (In fact this defines libertarianism.) The NAP. This is what they mean by "treating people like adults."
The initiation of force is immoral. IF you want to argue against libertarianism, show how it is moral to initiate force. IF you want to argue against a libertarian policy position, show how it violates the NAP.
Don't just vaguely name things that you imagine are scary ("Gilded Age" for instance) and then assert they are examples of libertarianism. (Shall I lay slavery at your feet? Would it be productive if I did?)
I don't suppose I could convince you to point to a link/paper/whatever that describes exactly what you mean here? Because, no offense, but so far this sounds like Rush Limbaugh-style labeling.
I'd also like to see an example, if you have one of Libertarianism working anywhere at a reasonable scale. Having no safety net (assuming Libertarianism implies that) means some peoples' very survival falls to the charity of others.
Personally I think the US already had its Libertarian utopia and the current state is the result. Innovation is terribly difficult and expensive and will simply be ripped off if it even works, so Game theory tells me that any big company will be doing what ever they can to avoid it. A simple choice is investing money in growing the government to erect barriers to entry in your market.
>As for gold, I suggest you study the history of money, and economics while you're at it, and pay particularly close attention to the predictions and results of those "libertarian economists", the austrians.
Well, to me the issue is "currency shared across multiple autonomous economic systems" vs each system having its own currency. Gold is just another entity that has an expectations-based value like fiat currency is. Tying ones currency to it seems to me little different than tying one currency to another currency (e.g. China -> USD). This is why I've, so far, written off the argument of going back to a gold standard. What if you need to depress your currency for international competitive reasons?
Perhaps not the best reply to someone complaining about robber barons. ;)
You have no idea about basic economics and it isn't my job to teach you. Look up 'deflation' and read this:
http://m.cnbc.com/id/40088925/Roubini_Here_s_Why_a_Gold_Stan...
Finally, the gold standard would still be fiat currency. Governments only stay on it when it benefits them, or when they think it does, and can go off it at any time.
> libertarianism does lead to the rapid advancement of a society from third world conditions to first world conditions
Only by allowing companies to optimize for profit and advancement at the expense of everything else.
That's it, really: The Libertarian ideal of free markets deciding practically everything means that whoever gets ahead in the free market can write their own laws, effectively, and not have to worry about any externalities (like pollution, or injured workers, or so on) they create.
You also haven't made the case for it helping a country that's already in the First World.
> Libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle.
Which is simplistic in that it deliberately ignores all of the ways to initiate force that companies actually engage in (union-busting, polluting, legislation-purchasing) and focuses on the crap they don't do, like breaking-and-entering or outright homicide.
> IF you want to argue against libertarianism, show how it is moral to initiate force.
No. Not valid. I must merely show that Libertarianism is a sub-optimal way to prevent the initiation of force, which I have above.
> you imagine are scary ("Gilded Age" for instance)
You really don't know how bad the Gilded Age was, do you?
Libertarianism is an ideology too.
Wikipedia: "Libertarianism is generally considered to be the group of political philosophies which emphasize freedom, individual liberty, and voluntary association. Libertarianism is variously defined by sources. There is no general consensus among scholars on the precise definition nor on how one should use the term as a historical category. Libertarians generally advocate a society with little or no government power."
All of these beliefs reek ideology. You don't get a free pass saying "I'm for freedom". Not only because there are different kinds of freedoms, but also because any direction you pursue is full of assumptions of what society is and should be, what is the best for the individual and society, etc.
But the best sign that you are advocating an ideology, is if you are considering all other beliefs as ideologies and not yours. Like the above comment does.
Politics entails ideology. Presenting your view as some kind of empirical hard science is bullshit. And, as an aside, it's what the so-called "vulgar marxists" did.
(Not only Libertarianism is ideology, it's also mostly geographically and culturally constrained: it's first and foremost an American product).
I don't see any edit, so the current text is what I replied to.
You're saying that "you can find no evidence that nirvana ever claimed libertarianism wasn't an ideology".
Well, I read the sentence: "most people are not libertarian, and so they down vote comments that don't fit their ideology" as a claim that a) libertarianism is not an ideology, b) libertarians don't down vote comments that don't fit their ideology.
Isn't he basically arguing as if libertarians are somehow above downvoting people who disagree with them? That is, they are, somehow, above ideology?
I consider both claims as false.
Even more so, because what the ideology you follow claims and what you practice are not really related. Christians are as prone to breaking the "seven-deadly-sins" as anybody else, and libertarians are just as prone to downvoting people they don't agree with as anybody else.
That I was downvoted because of arguing against libertarianism is as good evidence as any, isn't it?
You are making similar assumptions about the sentence you quote. He only makes claims about the downvoters ideologies, with no reference to libertarians' ideologies. Even if he does think something idiotic like that libertarianism is not an ideology, which I doubt, he had the sense to keep it out of this conversation.
This is practically the definition of the straw man fallacy.
Maybe in some "axiomatic-pure-logic-language-land" what you said holds true, but in real natural language land, when we mention something about X, we do it in order to compare it to that which is not-X.
That is, if we are to assume that the libertarians have the same downvoting habits, then there would be ABSOLUTELY NO NEED for him to even mention the downvoting habits of the rest of the population.
>This is practically the definition of the straw man fallacy.
No, it's practically the very definition of extracting the meaning of a statement beyond what it explicitly states, i.e the very cornerstone of having a discussion: drawing conclusions.
I think that extracting meaning beyond what a statement explicitly states is actually responsible for a lot if not most of the nonsense that happens in Internet discussions, because it's too easy to be wrong. Best to stick with pure logic when you can, or start off asking questions rather than refuting something they might not have meant.
It's worst than that. Re-reading it, he explicitly states:
"most people are not libertarian, AND SO they down vote comments that don't fit their ideology" (emphasis mine).
"AND SO" implies directly and explicitly that "most people"'s downvoting is BECAUSE they "are not libertarian".
Which is the same as to say that if they were libertarians they wouldn't downvote in that way.
That is a claim about the downvoting habits of libertarians, if I ever saw one.
Further the rest of your comment was equally fallacious. But by pedantically arguing for your right to put words in my mouth, you have managed to derail the topic into a meta discussion.
So, you illustrate another tactic-- besides downvoting- that is used to prevent effective discussion of libertarianism on social news sites.
If that's "all you was communicating", then you phrased it badly.
"most people are not libertarian, AND SO they down vote comments that don't fit their ideology".
AND SO explicitly states that the reason people vote down post they disagree with is because they are not libertarians.
What you probably WANTED to write --which is made clear only by your subsequent clarification-- is:
"most people are not libertarian AND SO libertarian comments (as well as comments of other marginal ideologies) are voted down more".
Not the same at all.