Either you're insinuating that 'tptacek is a malicious actor, or that he's incompetent. That's a pretty serious allegation to make without providing any evidence whatsoever. Do you have any? I'm sure you can dig up a few examples of things that he said which were incorrect, but very few of those will not have been followed by a correction at some point, and either way your insinuations seem to go beyond "being wrong some of the time".
HN is incredibly fortunate to count members like 'tptacek as part of its community. We should be behaving in ways which encourage more comments and commenters of his ilk, not less.
Unsurprisingly you're already being down-voted. For a community that prides itself on being rational and home to spirited debate, when it comes to the NSA, any contrarian opinions (or even alternative perspectives) tend to be quickly attacked and silenced.
If you read some of the first threads when the NSA revelations broke out, there are heated discussions with various viewpoints and arguments. Now, it appears that most of these users have become tired of being instantly downvoted, and instead avoid these subjects entirely.
I hope that tptacek continues to participate in these security policy discussions, not only for his extensive domain knowledge, but also because he is not afraid to voice beliefs that disagree with prevailing opinion. And right or wrong, its very refreshing.
> If you read some of the first threads when the NSA revelations broke out, there are heated discussions with various viewpoints and arguments.
Always mixed with a steady groan of "enough of NSA stories" and "none of this is surprising". The heated discussions were in no small part about wether this was even the problem it was made out to be and wether it should even be discussed (to this extent).
Not that I agree with downvoting instead of replying, or with bashing tptacek (Everybody loves telling experts "I told you so". Doesn't make us experts tho :P), but I don't agree with your narrative either. It's not falsifiable, anyway. People might just as well have given up on trying to downplay this, and walked away instead, which would be even worse. Why speculate. Bashing and downvoting for disagreement without argument sucks either way.
> Either you're insinuating that 'tptacek is a malicious actor, or that he's incompetent.
There is a large area missed called psychological bias. People who has close friends working in highly controversial areas has a tendency to become a bit irrational in the view of the controversy. An attack on the NSA becomes an attack of the friend. If NSA is immoral and wrong, the friends choice of occupation must be wrong, thus the friend must be wrong, thus an attack on NSA is an attack of the friend.
Don't really have a dog in this fight, but: up until today, there was no evidence "the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products".
I disagree with many of tptacek's opinions but honestly he's one of the reasons this site is great. He is capable of arguing with people with strongly opposing views with civility, which is something that is entirely too rare these days. He's also capable of admitting when he's wrong and being gracious when proven right. Also entirely too rare these days. I'd rather have a thousand tptaceks on this site than zero.
> He is capable of arguing with people with strongly opposing views with civility
You're clearly talking about a different tptacek, widely known on this site for his coarsely abrasive, impossibly high friction, social interactions and not admitting he's wrong on issues trivial or important. He's also widely known for a being an expert in his field.
All that being said, I agree with you that this site is more valuable with him on it and regularly participating. He's one of the actual experts in their field that makes this a much better forum than any other. IMHO, it's well worth the comment burn to talk and debate (friendly or not) with somebody of his caliber.
And being wrong every once in a while (regardless of his rightness in this case) does not make him either incompetent or malicious. It just makes him human.
tptacek, widely known on this site for his coarsely abrasive, impossibly high friction, social interactions and not admitting he's wrong on issues trivial or important. He's also widely known for a being an expert in his field.
What are you talking about? Whatever caricature you're illustrating here is not Thomas Ptacek.
With the way you've been talking, I would've suspected you were a newer member, but you've been around for three years or so. So I simply have no idea what you're talking about.
I think the thing to remember about Thomas, and me, and everyone else, is that we're all human, and we all have different moods which influence our behavior. Thomas's, on average, is exemplary.
I'm glad to see that he's got both of us defending him.
I'm talking about the same tptacek who I've personally butted heads with where he couldn't even accept being wrong about how to make stew (looking back, that was exactly 1 year ago to the day!)
I respect tptacek very much for his domain knowledge and expertise. He has great theories on hiring practices and cooking among others. He's one of the names I look for on HN.
But he requires lots of care and effort. I have to mentally peel back about half of his posts to remove the snark and assholery and get to the juicy bits. But those bits are usually there and usually worth the effort to get to.
That's okay, I'm a grown up and can deal with high friction in order to enjoy interacting with somebody who's truly intelligent. tptacek is just one of those types that comes with lots of smarts and lots of difficult personality and that's okay.
And for the record I'm also aware that I can be rather high friction and assholish as well, and not nearly as insightful as tptacek.
EDIT: You know what, I'm not going to dignify this any further, other than to say that I don't want HN to be however you think HN should be. By saying "he requires lots of care and effort," you're discouraging people like Thomas from participating, and therefore making our community worse as a result. How would you feel if you saw someone talking like that about you?
I'm not even sure what your responding to?! In no way am I insinuating that tptacek shouldn't participate here or that his voice isn't extremely valuable. I'm not being facetious when I said I'm glad we're both defending him.
I'm logically one of the last people to defend him here having butted heads with him so much, but in fact I deeply value his presence here.
> How would you feel if you saw someone talking like that about you?
I'd probably agree with them. I'm not a high-school kid afraid of how my peers will see me and neither is tptacek. I've said as much about his communication style to him directly.
I highly doubt that tptacek doesn't have enough self-awareness to know that he's a high maintenance debate partner. There's no reason to paint him as a saint, he's just a guy. A very smart guy, but he has his foibles and flaws, which are far outweighed by his contributions. But to ignore those more difficult parts of his personality does him a disservice by not seeing him in his entirety.
I respect the entire person (as much as I can see through the limited lens of HN) not just the parts I think are praiseworthy.
He deleted, i.e. retracted it. In full. To harp on about it instead of talking about the story kinda sucks. We're talking about mass surveillance and everything being recorded, and look at what we are doing. Repeat after me: every day is a new day.
As much as he can get under one's skin, and as much as he can be abrasive, and any number of other things, I trust his opinions on security and crypto.
He's rational to a fault--unfortunately, that means that when facts change he may be left with egg on his face. I don't think there's anything wrong with how he's handled this stuff.
I'm also doing the Matasano crypto challenges and they are pretty priceless, don't know of anywhere else who offers a similar learning experience by breaking stuff, for free even.
I find tptacek's remarks to be enjoyable, generally speaking. In regards to crypto, I value his opinion highly, especially compared to my own novice opinion.
That said, I seldom trust anything I cannot verify. In matter s of crypto, that often means that I accept some things as magically working, and accept that the magic could wear off at any minute. Same thing with CPUs. I know generally how they work, and understand bitwise logic, but for the most part, they're just magic boxes that I've got enough experience with to have an expectation of.
In matters of the government, the fault I find with tptacek's arguments (and I hadn't even realized that it was a thing until this thread, but now I'm caught up) is that I think it is naive to trust the government. The federal government is something that our founding fathers encouraged us to be suspicious of. They specifically prescribed that, in order for our democracy to thrive, that we should be ever vigilant in regards to those we entrust with power.
Assuming good faith on the part of the NSA is naive, whether or not they're acting scandalously. Assuming good faith on the part of any politician is naive.
That isn't to suggest that we should never trust anything the government does, but if there's ever the potential for abuse, we should expect that potential to be abused at some point. If there's a loophole that could be exploited in any way, we should expect that it will be.
This diatribe isn't really directed at this comment, per se, but at your "have to trust __something__" comment, which I completely agree with as a generality. As humans, we routinely put trust into a great deal of people and things all the time, but I disagree that a government, even a pristine, flawless, immaculate government, is deserving of that trust, and it is our duty as citizens to thoroughly distrust it.
After reading tptacek's comments in the latest thread about Telegram https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940665 I can only agree. He insisted Telegram team should abandon its custom solution without providing any actual proof that it's vulnerable. His advice was to rely only on "modern" algorithms (mostly the ones included in "NSA Suite B Cryptography"), but he provided zero evidence why these algorithms should be more secure than the ones already in use.
In cryptography, the expectation is that the person presenting the algorithm should substantiate their claims, preferably with a proof. Saying that something is secure because it hasn't been broken yet does not settle well with people. And when it does happen, it's clearly caveated ("assuming the hardness of Discrete Logarithms", for example).
That aside, your challenge smacks of snake oil. I gave an analogy earlier that captures the essence of the complaints:
Suppose I am selling fire-proof safes. These are designed to protect your documents and valuables from thieves and from fire and other events.
The normal way people set up tests is to put some documents and valuables in a box and actually try to break it (MythBusters style, bringing out cool machinery and trying different ways). For fire resistance, there is a rating system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-resistance_rating) and a standard way to test.
The Telegram proposition is: we are going to place the safe in Fort Knox. If you can't break the safe that is in Fort Knox, then clearly our safe is secure.
People are arguing that in order to break the safe, you have to break into Fort Knox. And for all intents and purposes that's not going to happen. You could have put a cardboard box in Fort Knox but no one can tell the difference because of the way you structured the challenge.
In that sense, you aren't testing the real-life security.
You guys are still failing to appreciate that your composition of cryptographic primitives is unproven, which means it is probably broken. Why is it probably broken? Because most compositions of crypto primitives are broken and your adversary is so formidable he will find the smallest problem.
In cryptography, you either prove it is safe or you consider it broken. Your choice should be considered broken until you prove otherwise.
This is a really bad and somewhat frustrating comment (if you're trolling, nicely done). He's absolutely correct about Telegram and this is not how you run crypto contests. This isn't even a tptacek opinion, it's a "everybody who has any reputation in the crypto field" opinion.
Edit: Oh, you're the Telegram employee who designed the contest. I encourage you to read moxie's blog post, and Schneiers rebuttals to crypto contests that are probably linked all over your other threads.
Ah, the Telegram HN account just said he "proposed the contest", so I assumed employee. If he is the financier, then it is not surprising that he doesn't understand why his crypto contest is a bad idea.
right and it also explains why the Telegram guys went ahead with his suggestion, because they're presumably keen to keep their main financial backer happy.
I don't think there's any attempt to sell snakeoil here, this is a case of a road to hell being paved with good intentions. To people not well versed in cryptography the things Pavel is saying and the approach Telegram is taking all seem completely reasonable, and the people who do do crypto and are responding might as well be talking a different language. To them the flaws and red flags are so obvious that their responses are incredulous, which has led to the vitriolic back and forth we've seen - neither side can comprehend the other's position. This is Dunning-Kruger[0].
With all due respect, nothing can be "obvious" unless it is proven. You cannot take something for granted just because a respected cryptographer says that. Not after we learned that NSA pushes backdoors using respected firms and people in the crypto-community.
By this reasoning you should presumably agree that the onus is on Telegram to prove the security of their system, not on the rest of the cryptography community to prove that it is insecure. Telegram have completely failed to do this. Even if Telegram had a formal proof of their system (and implementation), would you be in a position to read and understand that proof? I suspect not. Like me, you'd have to trust a group of respected cryptographers to do that job for you, so I don't really know what you're trying to say here. Just because one or two respected cryptographers appear to have become NSA tools, does not mean everyone has.
Also note that it's not a case of one random crypto guy saying that Telegram's approach is flawed, but a case of virtually the entire crypto community saying that the approach is flawed. Does this not ring alarm bells for you? How can you judge that the Telegram guys know their stuff and aren't leading you down the garden path or are themselves deluded?
With your backing, there is a real chance for Telegram to bring secure communications to the masses. This is indisputably a noble goal, but the areas that Telegram should be innovating in are in UI and features - not cryptography. There is no such thing as mostly correct, 'good enough' cryptography, either the system is secure, or it's insecure - there is basically no middle ground. If you fail, it's a bit more serious than your typical software bug - innocent people can literally die - the very people that need this the most are the most at risk. These are the reasons Telegram have been met with such a frosty reception here. Because they come across as arrogant in an area where arrogance is the absolute least desirable trait.
The wish to broaden the contest is understandable and already taken into account http://bit.ly/1htlEod
What I was saying in the comment above, however, had nothing to do with the contest. I expressed concern about tptacek's aggressive promotion of one algorithms (branded as "modern") over the other (claimed as "anachronistic") without any substantial proof. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6941934
Here's an unedited Google Translate translation (I read it, and I think it conveys the message):
As I see it , there is not so much Anonymus as creators local competitor - TextSecure under Android . Telegram gathered a lot of users , and they're rightly fuss . The boys are torn between argument " either too new algorithm , why is it , if there is a proven " and your " algorithm either too old , why is it when new ." Nevertheless , trade on HN gives thousands of registrations Anglo-Saxons and tons of references .
I think the debate will be a good end to the competition announcement decoding traffic Telegram. Let's say I was ready to open all of my correspondence traffic since registration in Telegram and give $ 200,000 to anyone who will decipher it and tell you how . As a result Telegram or detect and close the loophole for special services, or - more likely - will receive another proof of the inviolability of their protocol
Я помню первый обзор о ВКонтакте на Хабрахабре, кажется, в 2006 году. Эксперты делились комментариями вроде "кто они такие", "еще одна соцсеть не нужна" и "на php пишут только нубы". Неудивительно, что HackerNews, построенный примерно тех же принципах (карма, ранжирование), создает чувство deja vu.
Тем не менее, будет здорово, если там объявятся не только любители поговорить, но и те, кто реально прочитает документацию к MTProto.
Which roughly translates to:
I remember the first reviews of VK back in 2006. The experts were saying "who are they?", "we don't need another social network", "only noobs write in php". It is not surprising that HN is built on the exact same principles (karma, rankings), brings up a deja vu.
However, it would be great if someone who actually read the MTProto docs can show up, and not just those who like to talk.
In this case, it doesn't actually matter who he is, so there is no need really. Our responses would not be different if it were someone else saying the same thing.
