From: Pierre Uszynski <pierre@shell.portal.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 94 15:04:42 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Non-techie Crypto book?
Message-ID: <199401072303.PAA08252@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Quoting fnerd (all quotes from his post):

> Maybe there's a book on "Privacy" out there that gives reasonably up-to-date
> coverage of crypto.  I would love a book that covered all the sociopolitical
> cypherpunk issues like [...]

I don't know if a book is the right response (agreed with Duncan Frissell:
writing a book takes so much time, and reading usenet already doesn't
leave much :-), or if the cypherpunk archive is a step in the right
direction, but there is a problem:

The background relevant for an understanding of cypherpunks' concerns,
hopes, tools, political and economical non-agenda, and technology is not
something that can be acquired in one place, in a magazine article read
in one hour, yet. There is not one such document to which we can point
newbies that is a suitable introduction. Ideally, this document should also
be online.

It's something that came apparent to me when talking to friends about
cypherpunkish issues, and then the main reason I attended Tim May's
seminars at Stanford. The seminar was, roughly, to cover the issues,
the techniques, and the potential/eventual political and economical
consequences of crypto. The assumption was originally that the talk would
skip the details of crypto algorithms, and the math behind them (if I
remember well). And my conclusion was that a one hour
seminar is not sufficient for even an introduction to that stuff, even
to a theoretically bright audience.

There is too much to cover. There is too
little to start from. The seminar was ok for people who already were
aware of the basics in privacy, public key crypto, crypto-politics, and
computer networking. For them, the seminar kind of connected things
together, showed the wider picture.

But for others, not aware of privacy issues, not aware of even the existence
of public key crypto, barely aware of computer networking, etc..., there
is just too much, and lots of it just does not make sense. These others
are amazed that "Porn" (That Major Evil ;-) can come unchecked from other
countries on computer networks (heck some people don't even understand
that not all countries give a damn about the US laws :-(

For these same others, computer networks are still a very new notion. What
proportion of TV journalists understands what computer networks are about?
And finally, for the same people, crypto results such as unbreakable
encryption, secret sharing, untraceability (a la DC-net), digital cash,
remote coin flipping are utterly indistinguishable from magic. So much
so that most would just not understand it is possible. And when they
see and understand, say a demo of a DC-net, the consequences are still
impossible to grasp. It's the same as trying to explain the Internet to
a 1960's farm hand (no offense to farm hands). Some questions at the
seminar showed this kind of symptom.

All this leads me to the conclusion that if cypherpunks want to see more
awareness of possibilities and issues, they should concentrate as much
on generating a body of introductory documents, as on literally
"writing code". Generating stuff suitable for publication in general
distribution magazines would also help (and even potentially make some
money). From the level of awareness we can see out there, even very basic
articles should be acceptable by thousands of magazines and newsletters.
A book would help, but barring that, random intro articles here
and there would go a long way (BTW, Email and BillG just made the cover of
The NewYorker, for those who don't know yet, and showed no awareness
of privacy or crypto issues...)

It also leads us to the many people that believe that there is a
time constant dictating the adoption and understanding of new technology.
It may not matter how much we want people to understand it.

> Has anyone read the Michael Marotta book?

What's this one about?
Anybody has the full reference, and maybe a survey of the table of
contents?

> cryptocosmology- sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable
>                  from noise - god is in the least significant bits

ObRecommendedRead: Related to noise, communication, Kolmogorov complexity,
and god in the least significant bits :-) and bad writing unfortunately :-(
A science fiction story about SETI:
Carl Sagan, Contact, 1985, 434pp, Pocket Books, ISBN 0-671-43422-5

Pierre Uszynski.
pierre@shell.portal.com