Re: cypherpunks press

[Don <don@cs.byu.edu>]

ecarp@netcom.com sez:

> > Could someone please explain to me why Mitnick is a cypherpunk issue?
> > Myself, I have neither sympathy nor lack of sympathy for the
> > Markoff-Shimomura "pr extravaganza", see no "cypherpunk" opinion on
> > the subject, and don't see any reason we should, as a group, discuss
> > or care about the topic.
>
> I'm sure glad that you don't run this list, Perry, but it seems that you
> think you do.  I, for one, get rather tired of your seemingly endless
> attempts at censoring what *you* think is and isn't relevent to the list. 
> I see it as a cypherpunk issue, insofar as it deals with the issues of
> tracking down crackers, but I don't expect you to make the connection,
> since I guess the word "encryption" didn't figure prominently in the post 

My feeling is that Mitnick getting past security, and Mitnick not having
to decrypt at every stage, and stuff like that is good material, but these
topics generally have big ol' love handles attached to them. Describing
people's hot tub parties, for example, is not exactly cypherpunk material.

NeoNazi mirrors for freedom, in the same way, are central (or at least
directly related) to what cypherpunks fight for, but then the resulting
discussion about the morals of war, and whether it was right or wrong
are also slightly outside of the cypherpunks relevance, despite the fact
that information was or was not freely readable because of cryptograpy.
Discussing cryptography does not make it necessary to provide an in-depth
historical review (and subsequent flamewar) on the resulting consequences.
We know what happened at Hiroshima. Lets talk about future consequences
instead please.

I am imagine many people use (and I am headed this way) nntp.hks.net merely
to avoid large boring non crypto/political threads. Not everyone has this
capability, and now some of them have left because of the S/N. I'm talking
about real cryptographers, not weekend warriors like, well, ok I'm more like
a yearend warrior.On the other hand, Alice and others haven't posted lately,
so perhaps the noise is just the fill-the-vacuum pheonominon.

> Why don't you go and write some code?  Put those busy fingers to better

Perhaps he is. I am. Are you?

Don