--
A lot of doom and gloom posts have appeared about how
cypherpunks failed of their dreams.
We expected to overthrow governments world wide by tuesday,
and we did not. But despite this the cypherpunk agenda is
still progressing well.
We do have universal strong communications encryption, in the
universal adoption of the https protocol and VPN. That was
the biggie.
That one made e-gold possible. e-gold falls short of our
plans for anonymous digital cash, but it comes a good step
closer than anything that we had since they closed down
anonymous swiss bank accounts, and provides a necessary
environment that makes possible digital cash.
https begat e-gold, which will in due course beget Chaumian
digicash, which will in due course make governing
substantially less profitable.
VPN has also had a major impact in moving multinationals,
formerly wholly in the pocket of the state and utterly
servile to the state, towards the cypherpunk side of the
fence. I anticipate that teleconferencing over VPN is going
to change the behavior of multinationals a great deal, is
already changing them a great deal. Relationships between
multinationals and states are already becoming increasingly
adversarial.
Encrypted disks are still rare, but that is because raids
that seize people's computers are rare. Of course it is
regrettable that disk encryption is not part of the operating
system -- but if Microsoft put it in before we had a strong,
widely adopted system, they would doubtless muck it up.
Email, IM, and voice communication. remains entirely in the
clear and that is extremely bad. It seems to me that it
should be possible to sell a decent mail system to
corporations provided that the mail system provides forward
secrecy, thus guaranteeing that the only copies of possibly
inconvenient email are those in the computers of the
recipient and the sender. Note that existing standard email
encryption systems lack forward secrecy and so do NOT ensure
that the only copies of possibly inconvenient email are those
on the desktops of the sender and the recipient, and thus are
of limited value in defending against the most common threats
that businesses suffer.
--digsig
James A. Donald
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