4.5.1. "Cypherpunks write code" is almost our mantra.
4.5.2. This has come to be a defining statement. Eric Hughes used it
to mean that Cypherpunks place more importance in actually
changing things, in actually getting working code out, than
in merely talking about how things "ought" to be.
- Eric Hughes statement needed here:
- Karl Kleinpaste, author of one of the early anonymous
posting services (Charcoal) said this about some proposal
made: "If you've got serious plans for how to implement
such a thing, please implement it at least skeletally and
deploy it. Proof by example, watching such a system in
action, is far better than pontification about it."
[Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu, news.admin.policy, 1994-06-30]
4.5.3. "The admonition, "Cypherpunks write code," should be taken
metaphorically. I think "to write code" means to take
unilateral effective action as an individual. That may mean
writing actual code, but it could also mean dumpster diving
at Mycrotronx and anonymously releasing the recovered
information. It could also mean creating an offshore digital
bank. Don't get too literal on us here. What is important
is that Cypherpunks take personal responsibility for
empowering themselves against threats to privacy." [Sandy
Sandfort, 1994-07-08]
4.5.4. A Cypherpunks outlook: taking the abstractions of academic
conferences and making them concrete
- One thing Eric Hughes and I discussed at length (for 3 days
of nearly nonstop talk, in May, 1992) was the glacial rate
of progress in converting the cryptographic primitive
operations of the academic crypto conferences into actual,
workable code. The basic RSA algorithm was by then barely
available, more than 15 years after invention. (This was
before PGP 2.0, and PGP 1.0 was barely available and was
disappointing, with RSA Data Security's various products in
limited niches.) All the neat stuff on digital cash, DC-
Nets, bit commitment, olivioius transfer, digital mixes,
and so on, was completely absent, in terms of avialable
code or "crypto ICs" (to borrow Brad Cox's phrase). If it
took 10-15 years for RSA to really appear in the real
world, how long would it take some of the exciting stuff to
get out?
- We thought it would be a neat idea to find ways to reify
these things, to get actual running code. As it happened,
PGP 2.0 appeared the week of our very first meeting, and
both the Kleinpaste/Julf and Cypherpunks remailers were
quick, if incomplete, implementations of David Chaum's 1981
"digital mixes." (Right on schedule, 11 years later.)
- Sadly, most of the abstractions of cryptology remain
residents of academic space, with no (available)
implementations in the real world. (To be sure, I suspect
many people have cobbled-together versions of many of these
things, in C code, whatever. But their work is more like
building sand castles, to be lost when they graduate or
move on to other projects. This is of course not a problem
unique to cryptology.)
- Today, various toolkits and libraries are under
development. Henry Strickland (Strick) is working on a
toolkit based on John Ousterhout's "TCL" system (for Unix),
and of course RSADSI provides RSAREF. Pr0duct Cypher has
"PGP Tools." Other projects are underway. (My own longterm
interest here is in building objects which act as the
cryptography papers would have them act...building block
objects. For this, I'm looking at Smalltalk of some
flavor.)
- It is still the case that most of the modern crypto papers
discuss theoretical abstractions that are _not even close_
to being implemented as reusable, robust objects or
routines. Closing the gap between theoretical papers and
practical realization is a major Cypherpunk emphasis.
4.5.5. Prototypes, even if fatally flawed, allow for evolutionary
learning and improvement. Think of it as engineering in
action.
By Tim May, see README
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