On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote:
>Frankly, I doubt that you have read "The Communist Manifesto." For
>multiple reasons, including its length and boringness.
Boring I'll give it, but it's brief.
>But mainly because I have decided you are likely a liar. You said you
>"thanked me" for my Reading List, just about 4 days after it was
>published here.
I thanked you for pointing at something concrete, yes.
It represented a change.
>But I am willing to give you a chance: Just how many of the books on
>my list had you either already read or did you locate and read in the
>days between when my list was published and when you announced that
>they were not very useful?
Rand and Vinge; I had already read Hayek.
>Read Schneier.
>Schneier or any other of the N basic crypto texts. Diffie-Hellman,
>for example. Blacknet, for another example. This is really basic,
>basic stuff.
Yes, it is. Stuff that does not get talked about here. For
that reason, this list is near useless to anyone who actually
wants to learn about cryptography. Scheier was where I started,
but nobody wanted to talk about anything in there or develop
any of thos ideas. I now have the springer-verlag CD with the
book that is basically a table of contents for seventeen years
of crypto conferences. That is also a big help, although it's
frustrating to work with.
A vast number of articles, yes. But no discussion.
>Because you have shown a stubborn unwillingness to even learn the
>basics....and yet you claim the reading list I put out was useless to
>you, implying you had read and absorbed and evaluate those
>books...which I doubt.
Vinge and Rand, and Hayek too for that matter, had squat to do
with cryptographic protocols. Vinge described a few cryptographic
applications, but the underlying PROTOCOLS were abbreviated or
missing. They were not what he was writing about.
>Your questions mark you as profoundly ignorant of even the basics,
Yes, damnit, I feel that I *am* ignorant of a lot of basics,
because I read stuff, I think maybe I understand it and maybe
I don't, and nobody will TALK about it! Nobody is willing to
bounce ideas or discuss it in detail. Instead they want to
take the damn stuff as read, forget how it works, and start
invoking some fuzzy variation of it in some damn fantasy, the
same way Bell did with the idea of digital cash -- it was
pretty damn convincing until I looked close and realized he
hadn't done his homework.
How many of the lofty invocations of other cryptographic
concepts here won't hold water because they've been invoked in
the same fuzzy way by ignorant people or posers? I won't know until
I take them apart myself, will I? But trying to get the details
of them from this list so they _CAN_ be analyzed is like trying
to nail jelly to a tree, because nobody's interested in the
"implementation details."
>and, more importantly, of being willing to spend some time reading
>even the most basic, core texts. Asking about how keys are exchanged,
>how things work without "trusted servers," etc., marks you as a
>complete newbie.
Those are examples of the questions I had when I came here. Not
the questions I still have. I've found a few methods, out of
Schneier mostly, no thanks to anyone here. I bet there's hundreds
more methods than I've seen yet, and I want to know what they all
are because they have different, and usefully different properties.
I'm going to be working through the conference proceedings for
years.
>You claim you have been reading the list since Detweiler was active,
>which means since about 1995-96.
No, I didn't. I claimed I had read the list for about a semester (I
was taking a networks class, I read a lot of semi-related stuff)
during 1995 and I've been elsewhere since. I left for six years and
came back.
Bear
