the terms “crypto-Jew” and “crypto-Christian” were commonly used to refer to those who preserved their traditions through hostile times.

Nag Hammadi Library as Data Backup Among Shared Value Communities.

We need to create and maintain our own internets

the etymology of crypt is of course “secret”, and long before “cryptography” was a buzzword the terms “crypto-Jew” and “crypto-Christian” were commonly used to refer to those who preserved their traditions through hostile times.

Adam is both doomed to have the secret obscured from his eyes, and doomed to its ultimate revelation.

I view crypto as a fundamental human right, “the right to do mathematics”, which amounts to the right to reason. maybe more fundamental than many other “innate” rights! The one god who is Reason itself is not absent from any soul, any attempt to deny it is surely satanic.

Awesome! And I totally agree…

But Reason is the Truth and you can’t hide the Truth and shouldn’t have to when you exist in full union with it.

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

http://bible.cc/matthew/5-15.htm

Cryptography, in a sense, is Adam’s failure in Eden, and it dooms him to the crypt.

because there is no such thing as perfect privacy

Actually, “one-time pad encryption” is perfect, but the key-length must be as long as the message and cannot be re-used, not too practical for everyday use, but it is used by military for very sensitive things. You have to basically physically transport the keys yourself to keep security assurance.

Also, in the very unlikely event that P=NP or someone builds an actual super-Turing hypercomputer, all bets would be off on ALL crypto except the one-time pad. both possibilities would likely require a profound re-imagining of the problems. (quantum RSA cracking would seem to be hugely expensive for a couple decades.)

Do viruses come from anti-virus companies?

I think there was at least one such case, but cannot find the specifics at the moment.

I also know of a group of serious crackers who were working on a virus that would do nothing but spread and block ad-serving hosts, but this was years ago, and I have to assume they never released it, and there have been virii that targetted other virii and then un-installed themselves after spreading.

Cryptogon got digg-killed, apparently. I’ve got a LOT of sites wget-ed. I worry about a mass intertube shutdown due to DoS or governmental interference. It would be great if (not necessarily electronic) some kind of facilities could be set up to maintain communication between us endpoints in that event.

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I view crypto as a fundamental human right, “the right to do mathematics”, which amounts to the right to reason. maybe more fundamental than many other “innate” rights! The one god who is Reason itself is not absent from any soul, any attempt to deny it is surely satanic.

(heh, on the other hand: http://cantanima.blogspot.com/2006/03/augustine-and-mathematicians.html ;))

I’m serious that people start downloading and backing up each other’s websites and hosting mirrors for one another. Flipping the switch on any of us is the easiest thing in the world.

Better still: hard-copies.

no one has ever told me WHY it should be fundamentally hard to factor multiples of large primes, only that there’s no publicly known fast algorithm, despite many smart people working on it

This has always troubled me as well and I suspect that this is why PGP only stands for “Pretty Good Privacy” - because there is no such thing as perfect privacy (except maybe in the grave - the ultimate encryption algorithm).

Classifying PGP as a munition is not a legal tactic, but a language attack. It is trying to prevent people from using PGP, not because it is unbreakable, but because they don’t want to have to expend the energy breaking it constantly. So they create a law which is ridiculous but preventative to motivate behaviors in alternative directions. That’s all law does: manipulates motivations to actions (by manipulating consequences of those actions)

Whatever can be made can be unmade. Especially by the people who made it (Do viruses come from anti-virus companies?)

Mike Ruppert and Alex Jones promote bollocks “anonymity” software, apparently, and if they are using it themselves, they’re opening themselves up worse than if they used none!

I was quite into the cypherpunks thing in high school, and planned (I was too young for my state) to get one of these RSA tattoos:
http://cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/
before it was reclassified for export to most countries.

seems like a more than a couple of the cypherpunks wound up in jail, certainly the most hardcore have dropped out of sight in these nutty times.

this is a fun and educational (and valuable) little project, make your own code to decrypt the certificate:
http://ciphersaber.gurus.com

the history of crypto/stego is deeply influenced by the renaissance maguses, Agrippa, Johannes Trithemius, John Dee… it is a really difficult, but fascinating field.

I have always been worried, though, about PGP: no one has ever told me WHY it should be fundamentally hard to factor multiples of large primes, only that there’s no publicly known fast algorithm, despite many smart people working on it

back in early high school, I thought we’d all have anonymous untraceable digital cash (Chaumian cash) by now, and smart contracts to make government irrelevant…

still a crypto-anarchy optimist, i guess! seems now that most security issues are more about hacking poorly-designed systems than beating crypto, the software vendors have largely given up on these VERY complicated protection schemes they used to have… people used to worry about how hard it theoretically was to crack SSH… hackers don’t care, it’s so much easier to pull some DNS shenanigans and trick the stupid human into violating his own security!

I’m rambling here, but crypto issues dominated my brain for years!