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Cyphernomicon 4.5

Goals and Ideology -- Privacy, Freedom, New Approaches:
"Cypherpunks Write Code"


    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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