[HN Gopher] The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015) [pdf]
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The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015) [pdf]
Author : bluefox
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-08-06 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.cs.ucdavis.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.cs.ucdavis.edu)
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055 - Dec 2015 (93
| comments)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| There is an upside to political neutrality: It reduces the threat
| of politically-motivated attacks on academic researchers, which
| are dependent for the most part on government funding. TOR was
| begun under Navy (ONR?) funding, if I recall correctly.
|
| I agree with the premise, and wish the culture could shift to
| support more individual / societal privacy tools. However,
| advocacy for change at the societal level is as important as
| having a nice widget. TFA calls this _overt_ politics vs the kind
| of _implicit_ politics inherent in the power-transferring
| innovation that science/tech produces.
| wrnr wrote:
| Who are the signees of your root certificates?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| is it possible that trained engineers who take this engineering
| sermon to heart, are then not prepared to deal with daily, common
| corrupt practices and dark-patterns so prevelant in real-life
| money handling?
|
| Second, different question -- To what extent do you have to
| believe in good, to do good in real life. How much overlap does
| that have with the practice of cryptography ?
|
| Third question - are specialists in a complex society, able to
| have say and dominion over the tasks they are paid to do? Not
| theoretically, in practice now.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Favorite quote from Hellman talking about Diffie, "When I met
| you, you were traveling around the country as an itinerant
| cryptographer..."
| fddddd wrote:
| blockchain in the context of the society you describe is a
| fascists wet dream.
|
| there's a reason all political parties promote it (while
| campaigning), besides the populist parasocial emulation for
| votes.
| reedjosh wrote:
| > blockchain in the context of the society you describe is a
| fascists wet dream.
|
| Please elaborate?
|
| BTC would break the money printer and iff people self custody
| and use lightning then privacy can also be achieved.
|
| Monero does all that by default.
| godelski wrote:
| It depends how the Blockchain is implemented. A common
| misconception about cryptocurrencies is that they are
| private. The crypto means cryptographically secure, not
| cryptographically private.
|
| A Blockchain based digital currency could also hold the
| entire history of all transactions made by people and a
| privileged party could identify the holder of each wallet. In
| fact we can kinda do this with BTC, but we can't identify who
| holds the wallet until they cash in or out through an
| institution.
|
| This technology is the wet dream of a fascist regime. There
| are no secret transactions. Cash is non existent. Cash is
| only used by criminals. If you aren't using a traceable
| currency then you have something to hide. All transactions
| are stored. This should also be an issue for many because
| laws change and aren't consistent. Buy weed legally today, it
| gets criminalized, get punished. Buy a drink at the local gay
| bar, travel to a LGBTQ unfriendly country, get interrogated.
|
| It's not about what is happening so much about what could
| happen. How can the technology be abused. Maybe it's fine
| with our government but is it everywhere? It's about not
| giving power to saints that devil's my inherit.
|
| But this is why we have privacy coins. Some coins don't even
| maintain the leger but a hash of it (hashes all the way
| down). You can't peek at the leger but you can verify it is
| consistent (added benefit of keeping a static leger size
| too). You can have zero knowledge transactions. You can have
| differential privacy. All these technologies are not a
| necessary condition of a blockchain but are privacy
| enhancing. These are not a fascists wet dream but rather a
| major roadblock for them. Those fighting against them are
| allowed to operate beyond their knowledge.
|
| So the bigger again is what is the cost benefit analysis? Are
| terrorists and tax evaders such a problem that it is worth
| the technology that a future fascist could inherit? Or are
| they not?
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| The whole philosophy behind Bitcoin is a mistrust of
| institutions, primarily the FED, and the wish to replace them
| with what's supposed to be "neutral".
|
| But the criticism that is offered tends to be far off the
| mark: the FED isn't a "private bank", to name just one
| conspiracy theory. It is also far better at its job as people
| make you believe: the time of runaway inflation is a 100
| years behind us, and even the worst of recent crises in the
| financial industry is but a shadow of the Great Depression
| that saw actual starvation. It seems that economists may have
| improved somewhat, to the point where they are at least able
| to outperform the outcome of an algorithm that doesn't even
| try to use monetary policy for the greater good.
|
| Despite its flaws, the FED is also, ultimately,
| democratically legitimized. Bitcoin, despite its talk of
| democratization, allocates power proportional to mining power
| or, ultimately, wealth. That's closer to feudalism than any
| recent idea of democracy.
|
| There are dozens of other misconceptions that were baked into
| BC and other coins only to blow up. Sometimes spectacularly
| so. For example, the community seems to believe the law is
| nothing but pretense allowing judges to arbitrarily enforce
| their opinions. Hence, it is seen as desirable to allow for
| contracts that are not subject to any interpretation. This
| mostly comes up when someone makes a stupid mistake like
| omitting a decimal separator and paying 100x what's
| reasonable.
|
| In the "normal" economy, such errors are almost always easily
| healed. But the cryptocurrency community believes that
| anything that cannot be expressed in source code is somehow
| invalid. Indeed, they seem to take some gleeful enjoyment
| from seeing people subjected to punishment for minor
| mistakes, even where it is completely out of proportion.
|
| That points at where it could be called "fascist": that
| ideology abhors all deviation from the norm and punishes it
| severely. That's why Singapore's extreme laws against drugs
| or chewing gum are sometimes called fascist, and also why
| some on the right can't really understand why anybody would
| take offense at the idea of public executions for weed
| dealers.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > BTC would break the money printer
|
| How? What would be the scenario here? The Fed stops issuing
| USD and starts managing the economy using BTC? _Why_ would
| the US ever undermine their own sovereignty by doing that?
|
| Even if I give you that BTC is a viable currency, it's
| _another_ currency alongside all the others. What is the
| viable path to it becoming the primary currency of a country
| without that country 's consent? The IRS is still going to
| want your taxes paid in USD.
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for posting tedious flamewar rhetoric
| to HN and ignoring our request to stop. Not what this site is
| for.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28088809.
| DSingularity wrote:
| We can no longer see it as it is "flagged".
| woahitsraj wrote:
| I had the absolute pleasure of studying both Theory of
| Computation and Ethics in the Age of Technology under Professor
| Rogaway during my time at UC Davis and no other professor in the
| department challenged me both in the technical and ethical ways
| that Rogaway did.
|
| It's as a direct result of his classes that I have carefully
| crafted my career in computer science to not do work that would
| be potentially harmful to others. I wish more software engineers
| had the opportunity or interest to study and consider the ethical
| dimensions of our jobs. We have the power and the obligation to
| prevent a lot of harm and abuse by taking cryptography and
| security seriously. I'm disappointed by the recent backsliding
| Apple has done since they were one of the few companies I could
| trust to make this a priority.
| fddddd wrote:
| what did you work on out of college?
|
| and how do you feel about apple scaning all your local device
| data and reporting hash matches to the (undisclosed)
| authorities under the "think of the children" banner?
| motohagiography wrote:
| It's a valuable reference article by a lunimary I am not
| qualified to disagree with, and it captures the time well.
|
| When you look at who the antagonists to privacy are, they are
| political institutional actors. Rogaway even suggests they are
| in-effect predators on those they surveil. Framed that way, I'd
| wonder whether cryptography engineering for privacy is a
| substitute activity, and its neglect is just an enabler for what
| has historically been the meekness and even cowardice that
| facilitates the domination of human populations. As though there
| is a generation of young (mostly men) who are saying, "yes, the
| institutions are compromised, there are spies on every platform
| and brownshirts in the streets, but if we can just get this
| blockchain product to market, we can escape them." History
| indicates that's not how it works, and I think the time for
| cryptographic solutions has passed.
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