Interestingly, this is also true for DRM, which is also political but does not protect individuals, generally. So restricting what “can be done” as a political expression depends on the “for who?”, even if the tech itself is inanimate and neutral.
I've come to believe that no tech is neutral. Some tech allows more variety in the politics surrounding it, while other tech has a very narrow range or politics - like DRM.
DRM (and it’s hipster cousin “remote attestation”) stands out as being exceptionally political because it relies on the hardware to be controlled by a different actor than its owner and operator. Similar to “tamper-proof” physical objects, from the old days.
if computers are a technology, then DRM is an specific application of it???
ugh, I just destroyed my own understanding
Sadly the adoption of "trusted computing" on the server side has been slower than expected. Maybe because of lack of user pressure? Also my guess is that most companies prefer not to be too transparent regarding how they process our data...
DRM is one use that does not favor consumers, on the other hand we have encryption being used in apps like Signal to provide the same high quality software to every day consumers.
I'm very interested in quantum computers, specifically ones powerful enough to break AES and other types of modern encryption. What will that mean for humanity and individuals?
Quantum computers break several security assumptions. But not all of them and we usually can replace the broken assumptions. Discovering that P=NP, or that one-way functions do not exist, on the other hand, would imply that several secure cryptographic constructions that we want to use are in fact impossible and would be a much scarier discovery.
1. Practice-Oriented Provable Security and the Social Construction of Cryptography: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/cc.pdf
2. An Obsession with Definitions (Section 5): https://books.google.com/books?id=SwOkDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA18&ots=...
I formed my thoughts into a deliberately indirect dissection of this, and now I repost here:
Thanks for your input! I hadn't realized my post had made it to the subreddit since it was immediately removed, so it slipped my mind. Anyway, it's not really related to what you said, but I'll take your remarks as a starting point to have a riff / use as springboard for a thought that's been brewing:
Hearing you say that seasoned cryptographers wouldn't even bat an eye at this surprised me. I'd thought those well-versed in this domain could glance at an idea, scan the smhasher results, and almost intuitively know whether there's potential there or not. I imagined they'd have a sort of gut feeling, something like "this holds promise" or "this won't cut it," directing their decision to delve further. So, why is it such a challenge for non-experts to make substantial contributions? It seems as though there's an unspoken rule prohibiting it.
I suppose this isn't unique to cryptography; it probably exists in any specialized field, like bioinformatics. Yet, there's a distinction - when an outsider steps into a bioinformatics forum with innovative ideas and some groundwork, they're likely to find a receptive audience.
But with cryptography, it feels closed off. It's as if only certain individuals are permitted to work on specific topics within established parameters, and only an elite few are qualified to assess this work. It's reminiscent of religious doctrine where deviation is considered heresy and swiftly dismissed. This leads me to question who's guiding the crypto field to limit creative contributions and why? Who stands to benefit from curbing the development of new algorithms and preventing their widespread adoption? Who might be disadvantaged by a sudden surge of new, potentially powerful crypto algorithms?
It's a challenging balance to strike. Personally, I think the current system could be improved. As an impartial observer with no stake in the outcome, I see this as an intriguing creative outlet. I'm not advocating for a revolution and frankly, I'm not particularly concerned if things stay as they are. However, I do believe that when a field becomes too closed, we all stand to lose.
Here's the intriguing part: while the field is theoretically open, in practice, it mimics a closed one, similar I suppose to the restrictions and veil of esoterica surrounding nuclear technology. But nobody openly discusses this closed-off nature, which only adds to the strangeness.
I understand why it's structured this way, but I can't help thinking there could be a better approach. Given the diverse interests involved, it's challenging to identify what that might be. Surely, I can't be alone in thinking this way, right?
The field isn't closed off, either. It's just founded on mathematics that's beyond what the average untrained or semi-trained person reaches, especially the ones who feel entitled have Big Opinions on the subject. However, if some can't grasp the mathematical underpinnings of contemporary cryptography, their opinions of how cryptography ought to be done are worth less than nothing. Mathematics isn't a democracy, ignorance doesn't get a vote.
Unlike in many fields, there is no value in a cheap local substitute for cryptographic algorithms. Indeed vanity ciphers (many smaller powers wanted their own symmetric ciphers for national pride reasons) fell out of favour because they're just worse in practice.
So the competition for your Cryptographic hash isn't some idea by a guy from the next town, it's SHA-512/256 and maybe SHA-3.
Try something else, should the US Government have a department which vets architectural plans for a new Capitol building. Sure, the US Capitol is a pre-civil war building, and there's no reason it would be torn down and rebuilt or replaced as a whole, but surely it's unfair to just have one dead guy get to design the Capitol when who knows, Suzy, a ten year old from Maryland, who has no architectural training and mostly just thinks everything should have ponies on it, might have a better design? Why are there so many Gatekeepers? Suzy's design for the Capitol might be great, it's unfair that she's not considered just because she isn't an expert and they don't need a new one designed.
I really don't want to come across as mean, and I know what your response will be already, but everything a person can find out about you within a few minutes screams crank. You come here wondering why all these gatekeeper mathematicians in their cathedrals won't take you seriously, but it doesn't appear all that mysterious to me. You may very well be what you say you are. You'll live forever and colonize the galaxy, and along the way, also provide better cryptographic hashing functions. But you have to clear some kind of minimum bar for why a person should even look at your work. Most of these mathematicians are presumably not thinking they're going to live forever, so they only have so much time to spend considering everything a person on the Internet thinks they should consider. Whatever heuristic they're using may be as imperfect as Goldman Sachs throwing away any unsolicited resume that doesn't show an Ivy league degree, but they need some kind of heuristic.
He also teaches a call called "Ethics in an age of technology". The reading list is that of a philosophy professor rather than a cryptographer. I could not more highly recommend engaging with this surprisingly "unrelated" material.
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring23/
Rogaway challenged us in small group settings to explore not the implications of computers and the internet, but if technology itself on humanity. I.e the automobile, industrialization, printing press, etc.
Thank you Phil, you've changed my life for the better
I know it's not a widely accepted view on HN but you shouldn't downvote just because you hate cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and Ethereum (Ethereum which has switched to proof-of-stake, now consuming a negligible amount of energy) are actually two semi-successes of the cypherpunks. They were created as challenges to authority and released as free for anyone to use.
What happened next is open for discussion but I don't think the intentions were bad.
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34451250 - Jan 2023 (9 comments)
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28086917 - Aug 2021 (15 comments)
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055 - Dec 2015 (93 comments)
Essays like these aren't just moral admonishments; they offer a way to find deeper meaning in your work or figure out what work would have meaning for you. Personally and politically, there can be so much more to your tech career than just "puzzles and math."
[0] https://noncombatant.org/2016/03/27/security-as-caring-for/
https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000690/000690.htm...
Abstract: A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,”[Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.
To work professionally in privacy and cryptography is adversarial to the point of being gladiatorial, where there are very serious (and sometimes dangerous) interests involved. This work is not for the meek.
The moral aspect of it is that you need a belief in truth and the value of personal integrity that would sabotage most other careers. When you design security protocols, you are engaged in governance by other means. With real government and the economy using the internet as its substrate, using math and technical reasoning to moderate their more extreme urges is a kind of moral responsibility. Not to pontificate too much, but when I was a kid wanting to become a hacker, it was because it represented a way to be an ethical steward operating outside these systems. Not a gatekeeper or spoiler, but someone whose skills maintain a balance. In a career as a hacker working on these problems in govt, I did good work that I think has kept some specific totalitarian urges in check, by depriving them of the certainty and impunity an abuser requires. I tell younger people working in Privacy in govt that it is the only place in the public sector where demonstrating courage is the job.
This is a great paper, and almost a decade later I would observe that if you want to really make a difference in the world where you can secure the freedom for yourself and others to really flourish and be a benefit to humanity, finding ways to practice the triad of math, courage, and compassion together is the indomitable x-factor. Each without the other are useless, but the person using them together is often history's most decisive actor, imo.
