Re: RANT: When hi-tech is a hinderance (freedom w/in limits)

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

At 12:48 AM 1/28/96, Anonymous wrote:
>A short 'rant' on techno-dinosaurism...
...
>Cypherpunks or crypto relevance?  Sometimes high-tech can be
>a weakness.

The canonical story being Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority," said at one
time to have been required reading at MIT.


>I've heard that the Soviets, not having the luxury of sexy
>Crays and whatnot, were adept and using hundreds of PCs to
>do their cryptanalysis... and so may have a lot of interesting
>parallel processing algorithms.

I'm skeptical. Sun Microsystems did indeed buy up a bunch of Russian
programmers, a couple of years ago. Haven't heard anything come out of
this.

And loosely-coupling PCs, for a task such as Anonymous describes, does not
sound like terribly good preparation for other tasks. No point in
speculating further, as the speculations and counter-speculations are
underdetermined.


--Tim


Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
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