What point are you trying to make... can you state it clearly?
The complaint in this thread is that republicans are being hypocritical by claiming to want "small gov." and "individual freedom" while they push for new laws restricting peoples freedom.
No one here is questioning the merits of not exposing kids to porn...
Isn't that beside the point when the "de-anonymisation" laws triggering all this applies to both children and adults...
Bittorrent was released (2001) 2 years after Napster's initial release (1999).
AFAIR, prior to Napster file sharing tools were limited to searching one server / channel / peer at a time (e.g. Usenet, FTP, IRC and BBSs). Napster was the first *network wide* searching tool I encountered and that made it a *much* more effective tool than anything I'd used before. IMO, that, and the nice UI (which resulted in a much bigger user base on to the platform), is what set Napster apart at the time.
Why would you think I have no clue? Like what *actually* justification do you have to think that?
All you seem to be doing here is wallowing in your own cynicism, knee-jerk tin-foil hat BS and being an ass to people who contradict you. What you haven't done is provide a shred of evidence or data to support conspiracy claims nor ad hominins.
Let give you an example of what actually data supporting an argument looks like.
Claim: Neither NIST nor the NSA nor any other US Gov org was involved in defining the schemes, nor the underpinning mathematics for *any* of the PQC finalists.
Justification :
1) Public record (and my own experience & contributions in the area) show the schemes --- and the *long* body of mathematics they are based on --- are the product of a variety of academic (and a few industry) cryptographers primarily in various countries (primarily at European academic institutions).
2) Some of the authors of PQC finalists have made entire careers out of presenting alternative cryptography to USG approved schemes. (E.g. Daniel Bernstein)
3) The basic process for defining new crypto schemes has fundamentally changed since the days of DES, SHA1, NIST Curves and DUAL_EC_DRBG. Selecting AES was a harbinger of how things are done now. The PQC competition by NIST follows in those same footstep. The USG does NOT provide designs anymore like it did with DUAL_EC_DRBG (and the related RFCs "hardening" TLS). Nor does the USG vet candidate schemes (alone at least). It doesn't opaquely set constants either like it did for the NIST Curves. Those days are gone *because* of the whole DUAL_EC_DRBG debacle and predecessors. People, rightly, demanded a new process designed explicitly around openness, inclusivity and verifiability. Thats what we have now. Today, the role of gov (NIST & NSA) is to set design criteria, provide one (of several) open forums for discussion/info sharing/and ultimately to synthesis the discussion into a *publicly justified* decision about which schemes win.
Lazy-ass arrogant cynicism and ad hominims only serve to (badly) mask ignorance while ruining any opportunity for actual *valid & justified* criticism based on which things could then be improved.
Absolute poppycock.
> concerted effort to place backdoors
What? Have you thought this through just for a second? How does this even make ANY sense? Why would everyone and their grandmother then be pushing for, and deploying, PQC in *hybrid* modes with classic algorithms specifically designed such that backdoors in PQC are only useful if you can ALREADY break classic stuff? And, if they could already break classic stuff who in their right mind would push for PQC at all if they actually care about breaking crypto? Lets not let a love for conspiracies and cynicism get in the way here.
> the proposals are so laughably weak
mmhmmm... care to share? its not like this stuff hasn't been vetted for at least 2 decades by academics the world over soon joined by governments and now industry too. most of that very publicly and very internationally. nor is it like problems weren't found along the way and designs discarded. no, the vetting process has been distributed, public, long, excruciatingly detailed & paranoid and exacting. so please please, enlighten me what motivates your bold claim here.
> QCs, if they ever work, cannot win an arms-race against conventional computing in this space.
QCs work today. the question is, of course, scaling. and though its not actually entirely clear what your sentence is really trying to claim. (To be a serious threat, QCs dont have to break contemporary crypto. Its enough if they break today's crypto since we've largely not transitioned yet. thats a race against time not conventional computing tech.)
That aside, what is clear to me is that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else can possibly know how QC tech will play out in the coming 3-5 decades. And I say 5 decades because thats *conservative* lowerbound on how long we need some today's encryption algs to provide security for us for the more sensitive use cases.
In fact, the only way anyone could know if QCs will ever be powerful enough to break meaningful crypto is if they already have. On a related note, just a few years back the chinesse quite suddenly went from being very vocal about there (rapidly accelerating) quantum and QC research to almost going complete dark about it. This, of course, rattled a bunch of cages in the west. E.g. we very soon after got that white house memo mandating a PQC transition across the US gov.
It appears that PL/I (and its dialects) is, or will be, the most widely used higher level language for systems programming. -- J. Sammet
