I like the idea floated here- cypherpunks won, and that there are new futures to be seized.
Overall, the most cypherpunk thing I can suggest to people who want to move things forwards- ignore cypherpunk. Figure out how to get people orchestrating and controlling their own host of devices among them and their friends. Break down the walls between local devices, string up some lines, and get people experimenting with managing, sharing and pooling their local resources.
We need whetted appetites for human control of the wider systems. We need people who want to harness their many systems (as opposed to be harnessed to your applications, subject to it's designed fancy), we need people interested in repurposing/reconnecting things as their environment changes. We need whetted appetites for sovereign control over all of one's devices. Empower and more so interest people in seizing the device and put it in it's role among the person's world, and cryptography will be just a facet of that great manifest will we've reawoken.
If you want to be a cypherpunk, be a cypherpunk tomorrow. Today, be a ubiquitous computer systems liberator.
If we're talking about privacy, even fully securing a single device per person would be highly usefull and should not be dependent on what is the status of other devices.
Actually, no: we're not talking about privacy here. I was asserting how incredibly boring privacy is today, and how we should stop talking about it because it's boring (except to me and you and our small cadre of crypherpunk friends) and we're locked out of understanding it in practice:
If you don't own the software (no one does), don't have control over it's behavior (no one does) and cannot see it's data (no one can), grappling with and understanding control over the channels can only be done in the extreme abstract. Sovereign computing proposes reversing the former, and giving people direct systems control, sharing, and orchestration capabilities. Ubiquotous computing proposes taking these exposed raw capabilities, and making them broadly and generally machine-to-machine.
I hadn't mentioned that cypherpunks have been extremely in the spot light, c/o anonymous (w/ major recent busts), silk road (busted), and that guy no longer in America; all of which are keeping cypherpunkery in the spotlight of late. I hadn't mentioned privacy; PGP, TLS, OpenVPN, & the only new and shiny on the block onion routing. Because I don't think privacy will have the public consciousness. Because privacy today means turning over whatever rocks Facebooks decides to leave out for you to turn over, and that's not useful. If crypto wants focus, it needs to actively support a counter SaaSS world, it needs to focus on creating new capabilities directly usable by individuals for interacting with other individuals.
Thanks, but as much I'd like to agree with opening things up, I don't think we have to give up our privacy or security for it.
By that exact same definition of software being interoperable and "aware" doesn't mean we have to expose our privacy. This may not be a popular option, but free(or paid) web services should allow us to store our own data, our own emails but make available interfaces and convenience of accessing our own stored data elsewhere.
The vast majority of people obviously do not care or even understand, they can happily choose to host on the cloud. I'm not letting my mom decide what Internet security and privacy laws should be. She cannot even comprehend what the implications of Facebook are.
I'd also like to mention not everyone lives in the hunky dory developed world where we're free to have opinions(debatable) and violent oppression is frowned upon.
The vast majority of the world does not live that way and has a lot of hardships to go through. Exposing their ability of free expression could hinder their ability to better their lives and maybe one day us.
I was mostly on board with this, until I saw Crypto-Cat front and center on their 'new projects' page. If anything, it's a step backwards for cryptography. Saying that you're secure and can be trusted, when the underlying model is broken is not a good way to promote 'modern cypherpunk'-ism.
I think there's a heavy dose of self-absorption going on here.
Cryptocat is a little better than it used to be, thanks to the developers dropping most of their homebrew crypto and implementing a version of the OTR protocol. Apparently they've even finally implemented authentication using SMP challenges, which was a major usability issue compared to traditional OTR clients. Until very recently, the only way to be sure someone wasn't running a man in the middle attack was to manually compare key hashes over an authenticated channel (and you had to do this every session at one point). The OTR developers had already discovered years earlier that this was enough of a pain that most people didn't bother and developed a more user-friendly alternative, but sadly it involved some fairly exotic crypto that the Cryptocat developers took an age to implement.
Ok, I think I'm lost in UX nirvana. I only see the first slide (I assume it's a slide show?) and neither clicking it nor pressing space/left/right keys advances the slide show.
Seems you have to hit the spacebar or right arrow key. No idea how we were meant to guess that, or why it's a bad idea to also progress on clicking...
EDIT: following update by parent post - Spacebar and right arrow key definitely work for me (also down arrow key). Backspace, up and left arrow keys move back. I'm using Chrome on a mac.
If the author is reading this: please use regular HTML in the future. Make your work future-proof by avoiding presentation gimmicks and delivering your content in a plain, honest way. Thank you.
I really enjoyed learning about these security concepts, and the slideshow was well made - but it might not be the best format for online sharing on sites like HN. I felt like it was missing a presenter's voice to tie things together.
Maybe HTML5 audio or video could be added to flesh out some of the concepts?
I don't mean to be overly critical because, again, I enjoyed the presentation. Just offering some food for thought.
edit: oh, I see from the comments that it's a presentation and you have to click on the black border where there's no indication that you should click.
Allow me to use this opportunity to mention how awful this is from a UI/UX perspective. Terrible design.
Hard to use on Android as well, since it sets ahistory state for each slide change. Get to the end of the presentation and have to press Back a hundred times to get to where it started. Not great.
Indeed. Why can't we just have pictures on a page that we scroll through? Or just these slides all layed out to scroll through? Why does it have to be fancy (and only half functioning)?
Hmm. It worked fantastically well for me on my nexus 4. I was very pleasantly surprised by this.
EDIT: I now see you are talking about going back to slide 1. I just tested and it took me ~5 seconds to swipe back to the first slide. Or you could easily change the url.
I immediately went for the arrow keys. That being said, I noticed that most people really aren't sure what to do when they see an intro slide [0]. A couple of arrows in the bottom corner never hurt anybody.
I thought the content of the presentation was good, but the format was kind of confusing. There wasn't any indication of where to click to advance the slideshow, or any indication that you were supposed to press space or right arrow to go on. In fact, I didn't even realize it was a slideshow until I came onto the Hacker News comments and saw what people had posted. After clicking around a bit, I had just assumed that the page was broken due to heavy load, or maybe there was an issue in my browser.
I think clicking on the black border isn't something that is obvious at all. Perhaps you could have some arrow icons on the side to navigate? Or even a text tooltip indicating that this is in fact a slideshow, and you can click on the borders or use keyboard shortcuts to continue.
Yet another unreadable site in the iPhone.
If you are doing something fancy, you should test it extensively.
Otherwise, stick to the basics. At least people will have a chance of accessing to your content.
The gist of it is that although the Cypherpunks 2.0 movement is doing fantastic pro-privacy work, it will eventually be constrained by the apathy of the average person who uses technology (aka, surveillance victim). I don't know how we can fight this, but we should try.
THEY WON!!!! YES!! Now wait a minute there is a global conspiracy to undermine the just about all strong crypto in just about all countries that has forced everyone to question just how many people have access to the conversations they have in whatever form. If you think that the cpunks won, you have most certainly lost. The winners are the ones who have formally ended the open internet and then had proof of their handy work splashed across the internet via leaked PowerPoint.
Cypherpunk now has evolved, they found that the most paranoid were not even close to the actual capabilities of the other-side were. Now the stakes are raised has even the academics (Matthew Green) and inter/national bodies (NIST IETF) have been shown to be victim of outside forces.
I thought it was an interesting presentation, but like many others here, I wouldn't have known it was anything had people not mentioned to press the space bar.
Overall, the most cypherpunk thing I can suggest to people who want to move things forwards- ignore cypherpunk. Figure out how to get people orchestrating and controlling their own host of devices among them and their friends. Break down the walls between local devices, string up some lines, and get people experimenting with managing, sharing and pooling their local resources.
We need whetted appetites for human control of the wider systems. We need people who want to harness their many systems (as opposed to be harnessed to your applications, subject to it's designed fancy), we need people interested in repurposing/reconnecting things as their environment changes. We need whetted appetites for sovereign control over all of one's devices. Empower and more so interest people in seizing the device and put it in it's role among the person's world, and cryptography will be just a facet of that great manifest will we've reawoken.
If you want to be a cypherpunk, be a cypherpunk tomorrow. Today, be a ubiquitous computer systems liberator.