4.5.1. "Cypherpunks write code" is almost our mantra. 4.5.2. This has come to be a defining statement. Eric Hughes used it to mean that Cypherpunks place more importance in actually changing things, in actually getting working code out, than in merely talking about how things "ought" to be. - Eric Hughes statement needed here: - Karl Kleinpaste, author of one of the early anonymous posting services (Charcoal) said this about some proposal made: "If you've got serious plans for how to implement such a thing, please implement it at least skeletally and deploy it. Proof by example, watching such a system in action, is far better than pontification about it." [Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu, news.admin.policy, 1994-06-30] 4.5.3. "The admonition, "Cypherpunks write code," should be taken metaphorically. I think "to write code" means to take unilateral effective action as an individual. That may mean writing actual code, but it could also mean dumpster diving at Mycrotronx and anonymously releasing the recovered information. It could also mean creating an offshore digital bank. Don't get too literal on us here. What is important is that Cypherpunks take personal responsibility for empowering themselves against threats to privacy." [Sandy Sandfort, 1994-07-08] 4.5.4. A Cypherpunks outlook: taking the abstractions of academic conferences and making them concrete - One thing Eric Hughes and I discussed at length (for 3 days of nearly nonstop talk, in May, 1992) was the glacial rate of progress in converting the cryptographic primitive operations of the academic crypto conferences into actual, workable code. The basic RSA algorithm was by then barely available, more than 15 years after invention. (This was before PGP 2.0, and PGP 1.0 was barely available and was disappointing, with RSA Data Security's various products in limited niches.) All the neat stuff on digital cash, DC- Nets, bit commitment, olivioius transfer, digital mixes, and so on, was completely absent, in terms of avialable code or "crypto ICs" (to borrow Brad Cox's phrase). If it took 10-15 years for RSA to really appear in the real world, how long would it take some of the exciting stuff to get out? - We thought it would be a neat idea to find ways to reify these things, to get actual running code. As it happened, PGP 2.0 appeared the week of our very first meeting, and both the Kleinpaste/Julf and Cypherpunks remailers were quick, if incomplete, implementations of David Chaum's 1981 "digital mixes." (Right on schedule, 11 years later.) - Sadly, most of the abstractions of cryptology remain residents of academic space, with no (available) implementations in the real world. (To be sure, I suspect many people have cobbled-together versions of many of these things, in C code, whatever. But their work is more like building sand castles, to be lost when they graduate or move on to other projects. This is of course not a problem unique to cryptology.) - Today, various toolkits and libraries are under development. Henry Strickland (Strick) is working on a toolkit based on John Ousterhout's "TCL" system (for Unix), and of course RSADSI provides RSAREF. Pr0duct Cypher has "PGP Tools." Other projects are underway. (My own longterm interest here is in building objects which act as the cryptography papers would have them act...building block objects. For this, I'm looking at Smalltalk of some flavor.) - It is still the case that most of the modern crypto papers discuss theoretical abstractions that are _not even close_ to being implemented as reusable, robust objects or routines. Closing the gap between theoretical papers and practical realization is a major Cypherpunk emphasis. 4.5.5. Prototypes, even if fatally flawed, allow for evolutionary learning and improvement. Think of it as engineering in action.
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