From: Jeff Simmons <jsimmons@goblin.punk.net>
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 95 17:18:40 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: CYPHERPUNK considered harmful
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950917184519.17849D-100000@polaris.mindport.net>
Message-ID: <199509180014.RAA00341@goblin.punk.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> 
> On Sun, 17 Sep 1995, Black Unicorn wrote:
> 
> So if you are so intouch with Joe Sixpack, what does he think?  Do you 
> have some evidence to suggest that there is any widespread awareness of 
> the issues among Joe and Jane?  Surveys?  Studies?  Anything?
> 
> Go out on the street and ask 10 random people.  Hell, ask 10 
> intellectuals not in the computer science field.  I think your level of 
> disillusion will approach mine, and if not, then I do not give your 
> powers of observation much credit.
> 
Actually, I think it's even worse than that.

I dropped by the weekly 'meeting' of the Cal Poly SLO Computer Club (OK,
these are the locally notorious slo.punks, and the meeting is more of a
social get together than anything) last Monday night.  I was interested
in getting people's reactions to having a large number of people's 
anon.penet IDs publicly posted.  What I found was kind of scary.

No one was aware of the existence of any other remailers than anon.penet.

Everyone assumed that the University is logging all mail to anon.penet, and
no one particularly cared.

One woman asked me why she should use PGP when it could be so quickly broken.
Turns out (I am NOT making this up) she didn't know the difference between
PGP and ROT_13!

Knowledge of security was limited to the technical details of setting up
systems such as Kerberos and firewalls and not using your SSN for a password.
No one had any idea of the algorithms involved, or which ones are truly
secure and which ones can be easily broken.  Etc.

These are all undergraduates in the process of getting BSCS degrees.

-- 
Jeff Simmons                           jsimmons@goblin.punk.net