Can We Cut the Crap?

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

Really, the S/N ratio is approaching all-time lows, even for the Silly
Season of Xmas. A week or so ago there was a massive flame war involving
insults and counter-insults--I returned from my Xmas vacation to find the
list melting down. Now, a week later, a new flamewar has erupted.

There is no point in the back-and-forth of insults, "Dr. Fred is a loon,"
"Alice is Detweiler," and other such nonsense. If you don't want to read
the comments of Fred Cohen, Dimitri Vulis, Alice whatever,
Vlad/Lance/Larry/Pablo, then just don't read them! Filter them out, delete
them immediately, read them briefly, whatever.

At 5:04 PM 12/31/95, deadbeat wrote:

>Regarding Fred Cohen, PhD:
>

[typical personal insults elided]

>Let's also consider the granting institution, a second-rank school.

Well, not quite. I seem to recall that Cohen's advisor at USC was Len
Adleman, known perhaps to some of you as the "A" in RSA and more recently
as the guy doing the "DNA computing" work. He was also working on viruses,
perhaps in conjunction with Cohen, as of 1987-88, and gave an interesting
paper at the 1988 Crypto Conference on "An Abstract Theory of Computer
Viruses." Not surprisingly, Cohen's papers were the main citations.

I recall Adleman describing in the oral talk just how it is that
determining if a given program contains a virus is essentially equivalent
to solving the halting problem, i.e., it may be undecidable whether a
program has a virus, except presumably in some special cases (e.g., for
very small programs).

>Cohen's thesis broke new ground, but how many people have read it, or any of
>his writings, or know anything about his ideas beyond a single word?  How far
>did he carry this work?  Where are the conference and journal papers?  Cohen's
>reputation faded into obscurity long ago.  Now he is building a new reputation
>as a pig-headed loudmouth, threatening his "defamers."  Shades of Sternlight.

I have plenty to disagree with some of what Fred Cohen says, as I do with
many people, but this is just plain ignorant.

"How many people have read it, or any of his writings..." is a ridiculous
argument, even for an ad hominem. Those who want to read it, can read it.
The articles are readily available. I've even seen some of his books on the
bookshelves of my local bookstores (haven't read them, though I flipped
through "It's Alive!" and didn't see much of interest....but how many of us
have written _any_ books?). I'm not convinced there's much more about the
_theory_ of viruses to "push forward," for various reasons. The theory was
laid out, some Bulgarians and others are busily writing viruses, but
there's not likely to be some whole reservoir of new theory to be worked
on. (This is true of a lot of fields, where the work done decades ago
basically was complete....look at how we all cite Garey and Johnson and how
little has changed in the field of NP-completeness.)

Blasting Cohen because you don't think he carried his work far enough is
clearly blasting wildly. Have you asked whether others on this list have
carried the work they did in their early careers far enough? (Did I carry
my work in the 1970s on alpha particle effects on chips far enough, or am I
just a Cohen-like slacker because I moved on to other things?)

Anyway, if you don't like Sternlight, or Cohen, or May, or Detweiler, or
Metzger, or Vulis, *filter* them out!

So why don't I just do this? Well, I do have a filter file in my Eudora Pro
mailer, and I use it. But I still see the crossfire on the list, the
pointless flames and personal attacks. This angers and saddens me. Hence
this message.

While I don't subscribe to the extreme view espoused by some, that the
topics of the list should be exclusively crypto, math, programming, and
Internet standards, I do think people should try to find some relevance to
the larger themes of the list. The recent increase in "one-sentance
repartee" is indicative of late-stage list meltdown. (Some of the posts
here quote a couple of paragraphs, add one or two lines of insults, then
have another screenful of PGP sigs, auto-signing sigs, anonymous IDs, and
then a conventional sig. Jeesh!)

I'm hoping that this is just a Xmas vacation silly season.

--Tim May

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."