Re: PGP fanatacism

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

An anonymous (why?--afraid to use your own name?) person wrote:

>Earlier, Tim May wrote:
>
>> Not only do many of us not do all this stuff (have you seen Eric
>> Hughes signing his messages? How about John Gilmore?), but some people
>> have decided to stop reading e-mail altogether. Donald Knuth, for
>> example. A wise man.
>> I'm happy that you PGP fans are thoroughly infatuated with using PGP
>> for everything. Just knock off the clucking and sighing about those
>> who don't see it as the end-all and be-all of today's communications.
>> It reeks of fanaticism.
>
>Interesting.  I wonder what this says though... cypherpunks promote
>encryption, digital cash, dc nets, data havens...
>
>but wouldn't ever be caught actually using any of the above.
>
>Hell, that stuff is way too plebian.  I'd rather advocate it that
>actually be in the uncomfortable position of following my own advice.

Anonymous flames are one thing, but incorrectly characterizing points of
view is another.

I and other Cypherpunks clearly use PGP at times. I just don't like having
to jump throught the hoops of downloading my mail to my home machine and
then decrypting it....I do most of my casual mail reading in "elm," on
Netcom, as I am online for several hours a day, and downloading is an
interruption. (There's also the issue of "on-line" or immediate clearing
vs. "off-line" or delayed clearing....I see an encrypted message to me
while I'm reading my mail in elm....I have two main choices: log-off, fire
up Eudora, download my mail, decrypt the PGP message, or, defer the reading
until the next time I download my accumulated mail. I often forget about
PGP-encrypted mail until I happen to see it again, which may be never.)

"All crypto is economics." And too often the effort of reading encrypted
messages turns out to be not warranted.

My ire at John Young came from his apparently malicious "tweak" at me in
which he sent me PGP-encrypted mail immediately after my post explaining
why PGP-encrypted mail takes me longer to read. That his message was
utterly banal and was not worth decrypting was the proximate cause of my
anger. (He claims it was an "accident." Maybe. But seeing that it was the
first PGP message to me ever, and it came shortly after my comments, and
was banal, I have to conclude he thought he was jabbing me in some way,
making some meta-point.)

Many Cypherpunks are running shell scripts and the like to make running PGP
easier. Mostly on machines outside their control, where the secret key and
the passphrase can be captured any number of ways (as others have also
explained). This is illusory security. OK for playing around, but to
lecture people like me that we should not be bothering with using PGP only
on our secure machines is folly.

PGP and mail both have a long way to go. In the meantime, I prefer to
concentrate on the things I do pretty well, like writing and thinking. I'm
not a Unix jock like many of you college students or C programmers, and I
like it that way. To each their own. I don't have a Unix box at home, only
a Unix account on Netcom's machines (and this is a 14.4 dial-up account,
not a SLIP or PPP connection). That's life.

Anonymity is OK, but I encourage critics to come out from behind their wall
of anonymity and give their actual names, or at least use a
digitally-signed pseudonym, so we can know we're talking to the same
person.

(I suppose Mr. Nobody will use this to claim that "Cypherpunks are against
anonymity.")

--Tim May

..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."