cypherpunks PR fluff-ups (was Re: Garbled in transmission.)

[Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>]

Sameer Parekh <sameer@c2.net> writes:
> ET <emergent@eval-apply.com> writes:
> > I can't remember it word for word, but it went like this:
> > "If you're going to decrypt financial transactions you'd better
> > be prepared to get 1000 computers and spend 3 months on
> > the project."
> 
> 	Not at all surprising, considering the wording of Rocke's
> press release. 

I agree.  He didn't even mention the possibility of hardware cracks,
nor estimates of times to break DES with hardware.

10,000 people burn more CPU than ever managed by a distributed effort
in history, and the PR is poorly managed.  You need to invest some of
that effort in PR.

Why no mention of the fact that the crack cost $10,000 (the prize money).

And what happened to the prize money?  (Who won it?  Did the guy
finding the key?  Or did something boring like giving it to GNU or EFF
happen to it?)

Why no source code?


Some general comments about the crack:

Many of the people involved in running the cracks seemed more
concerned with their own glory, or with getting their name in lights
to enhance their consulting rates, or the technical interest of it, or
control freakish tendencies over the management of it, arguing over
how best to design the software to conceal the key from the finder of
the key! etc, than in making a political statement about the weakness
of DES.

Seemed like few of them were cypherpunks at heart.

This reflected itself I think in the complete hostility to giving the
prize money to the winner, the fact that several of the cracks
wouldn't reveal the source code, nor their techniques.

The earlier cracks the cypherpunks as a group were involved in
(netscape breaks) were much more open (source code was released, and
benefited from release by others contributing speed-ups).  There was
none of this attitude which I detected amongst some of the DES groups
of excluding others from a small groups organisational effort, because
that group wanted the lime-light.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`