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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

Eagerly awaiting tptacek's retraction to his insistence that this was not a backdoor.

Edit: Nevermind, apparently he already did a mere 8 hours ago, replying to my own comment. Shortly before this broke.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6941366

The beauty of this backdoor, for all its faults, is that it was reasonable to believe that it wasn't a backdoor. And it was also reasonable to believe that it was. This backdoor is quite deniable, elegantly so.

So far I have disagreed with tptacek when it comes to what's backdoored and not. But I can understand his reasoning, and it's quite sensible.

Deleted comment

> Jesus, what a tool you are. I absolutely believe you: I think you read this story and eagerly awaited its implications to some random person on HN.

Huh, I've seen your patience tested on HN before, which tends to elicit mostly restrained responses save for a bit of snark, but that's the first instance of actual name calling I've noticed. I'm genuinely curious how this comment annoyed you. The tone I'd expect is more of a "yeah, you got me" <kneeslap>. Instead it sounds like I'm accidentally trolling you.

For what it's worth, I did legitimately get excited to run to HN to play "told you so". After months of debate over this issue across numerous threads, I'm not going to lie, vindication is momentarily exciting.

> For what it's worth, my take on Dual EC (before learning more about it) was the same as noted NSA apologist Bruce Schneier.

Wait, tptacek is calling Bruce Schneier an NSA apologist?

Aside from being absurd, your claim that you shared the same opinion is also false. Your own comment here directly contradicts this, and you even dismiss Schneier's credentials upthread, yet appeal to his authority in your comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424920

"I am aware that Schneier believes Dual_EC to be backdoored. I'm aware that Dual_EC comes from NSA. I would not use Dual_EC and would flag it if I saw it in an app I assessed. But I would still, right now, with the information I have, bet against it being an NSA backdoor. Not because I trust the NSA, but because it's a very dumb backdoor."

Edit: In reply to a now deleted comment by tptacek.

> Wait, tptacek is calling Bruce Schneier an NSA apologist?

I think that was intended as sarcasm. He's defending his previous position by saying that he (previously) had the same opinion as Bruce Schneier, whom no one would accuse of being partial to the NSA.

Your series of comments in this thread is way below the threshold for positive contributions to any HN discussion.

I'm curious as to your opinion of tptacek's deleted comment, and whether that was above or below the positive contribution threshold.

It was a reply to a taunt.

I'd say the original comment by lawnchair_larry comes off as a bit gauche... as if the XKCD "someone is wrong on the internet!" guy came here to post. I never saw the deleted comment, but it seems that after the initial frustration wore off, Thomas thought the better of it.

I've had my disagreements with some of Thomas' positions, including several over crypto/politics stories like this, but if you run out like that to play "gotcha!" it just doesn't feel right.

Whereas repeated pro-NSA apologies are? How many people would approve of them and how would they respond to them, if the person making them wasn't also all powerful in a forum?

> Jesus, what a tool you are.

This sounds like the start of a pretty angry prayer.

you'll probably get downvoted, but it made me laugh.

It actually get 60 net up-votes

Your reaction to this story was wondering if it can be used to demonstrate another member of HN being wrong in the past? Petty

When 'tptacek is wrong, he's obnoxiously wrong, especially in his inability to believe in government misbehavior, and his willingness to denigrate "message board nerds" on that sort of matter. (See also his attacks on Greenwald when the Snowden story started.) So personally I was looking forward to seeing somebody comment about him.

Pretty much. Not only that, but he's incredibly influential, so to see him get knocked down a peg does a lot of good.

This is a bit much and was not at all the motivation behind my comment.

This is what happens when you make it personal, though. I try to let being right be its own reward, not a license to tell people how wrong they were.

tptacek has the most karma on HN (even moreso than pg): https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders (for reference, pg has 149712 karma at the time of writing; tptacek has 165020 and the next person has 88887) His opinion is respected by many (and many accept what he says without question). A retraction by tptacek reminds us all to think critically

lawnchair_larry's comment is equivalent to questioning the president or a major celebrity, which oftentimes isn't a personal grudge.

What I do is just not read the usernames (beyond roughly scanning the word to figure out who replied to who). No really, I mean that, I don't even know your username.

That makes for a wonderful experience really. I interact with this nameless entity and each post is largely valued by its responses (I often leave an article open for a few hours to let the comments ripen a bit, that also adds a lot).

I think HN might be designed to encourage this, judging from the lighter color given to the post metadata line.

Comparing someone with high comment karma to the president is a bit absurd, no? The president could more aptly be compared to forum moderators on any given discussion website, as both have some executive power.

Yeah, I get that a lot too. Also his attitude towards open source cryptography related projects is strange and totally unjustified imho.

He's had a perfectly friendly attitude towards GPG, and in the case of others you can see ample evidence that his skepticism is justified. Maybe if the open source cryptography projects you're referring to weren't bad projects then the attitude would be strange.

cryptocat sucks, plain and simple.

> When 'tptacek is wrong, he's obnoxiously wrong, especially in his inability to believe in government misbehavior

For the record, this is incorrect. In past interactions he has stated his concerns over certain of NSA's "misbehavior".

Not just 'another member of HN', the most high-rated, the most prolific member of HN who is very often found shaping the direction of discussions here and is now a considerable voice in the security community. He's also someone that new tech startup founders listen to when deciding what to use and what not to use.

I know who tptacek is, I've read some of his papers, I've applied to the crypto challenges, I've disagreed with him in the past about the importance of BSAFE to the industry. It still comes across as petty to launch into a meta discussion of who's right and who's wrong on HN when there's much more interesting topics to consider based on this article's revelations.

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