8 ms·

Love in the Time of Cryptography

256 points by keehun 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dom0 10y ago
Recommended Soundtrack for reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99h6iPRPN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99h6iPRPN8 (Ludovico Einaudi - Elements)
UnpossibleJim 10y ago
I actual enjoyed this article and, more broadly, the subject of the governance of love. How much intrusion into our private (truly private) lives is enough? Are relationships, to a point, meant to be held in the public eye or can they be private? Granted, I'm a bit paranoid and pretty private. I've had a Facebook account in the past, but only used it to poke fun at people, but didn't care for the inevitable drama that followed (turns out, when you have a laugh at someone's outlandish political views face to face, you'll be fine but online, with those same friends, they view that interaction completely different). Obviously, by this small sampling of my personal self, I don't think highly of a governmental intrusion into personal relationships, but I'm pragmatic enough to understand their documentation and categorization. So I ask you this, HN. How much governmental intrusion into our private lives in enough? Also, how much intrusion into our personal lives do you think a semi-connected group of peers (our Facebook "friends") should get?
- shrimp_emoji 10y ago
  Both Facebook and relationships are for jive normies.
- tgragnato 10y ago
  Personally, I don't fear being snooped on or to have my comms eavesdropped. What I really fear is the interpretation perpetrated by whatever machine or whoever live-being. The view that more information produces better decisions is at odds with the world around us. What has always made a difference is our `incomprehensible` capacity to grasp someone with our emotional intelligence. Until there will not exist digital computers equipped with (digital) mirror neurons, until people will not think to empathy as something prioritized to a bunch of data, I'm not going to accept the judgment of none.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    There's an excellent episode of Star Trek Voyager where the Borg crewmate Seven of Nine installs a component into her brain that lets her sift through Voyager's immense dataset, and results in her secretly telling the first officer that she believes that the captain is a part of a grand and dark conspiracy. Then she runs the dataset again, and goes to the captain to say the exact same thing about the first officer.
tptacek 10y ago
In which a reporter falls in love with a fellow nerd she meets at a European hackerspace, maintains a long-distance relationship by messaging using showily bad file encryption, decides to move to Europe to cohabitate, and, lacking Facebook profiles to verify the relationship, relies on the testimony of friends and other anecdotal evidence sources, like hundreds of millions of other couples whose lives are imperfectly recorded by social networks. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, eat your heart out.
- dsacco 10y ago
  > like hundreds of millions of other couples whose lives are imperfectly recorded by social networks. Big, if true.
- ngnorton 10y ago
  You forgot to pitch Signal.
- michel-slm 10y ago
  what's showily bad about Jabber + OTR? Kind of curious, I know there are security issues with older OTR versions but is there a known weakness in v3?
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Not the Jabber/OTR thing. The decentralized nature of Jabber was pretty overblown, more something she wanted to be true and meaningful than something that actually was meaningful, but: whatever, it's 2011 at that point. It's the OpenSSL command line that I'm taking issue with.
    - tricolon 10y ago
      In the interest of learning, what's the issue with the OpenSSL command?
      - tptacek 10y ago
jawns 10y ago
A little bit about the author, Quinn Norton, for those who are unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_Norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_Norton She mentions in the article that "I came to the attention of a media storm after being struck by a tragedy. My life imploded, and between grieving and dealing with media controversy, my days became a sickening tragicomedy I couldn’t turn off." Could it have been this? > Norton dated Aaron Swartz for three years. Articles in The Atlantic and in New York Magazine indicate that she was pressured by prosecutors to offer information or testimony that could be used against Swartz, but that she denied having information that supported prosecutors' claims of criminal intentions on Swartz's part. Prosecutors nevertheless attempted to use a public blog post on Swartz's blog that Norton mentioned, which may or may not have been co-authored by Swartz, as proof of a criminal intent.
- apozem 10y ago
  As someone who's followed Norton's work for several years- yes, that seems like the most likely cause. She appears in the documentary about Aaron Swartz, "The Internet's Own Boy," and by her own account greatly struggled with that whole tragedy. It's a damn shame, in the least part because she is a superb writer. Her eulogy for Occupy Wall Street is a sprawling, stunning work of journalism. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/ https://www.wired.com/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/
  - killjoywashere 10y ago
    Note: in less kind light: this is the same Quinn Norton who burned Aaron Swartz when she voluntarily went to an "interview" with the US attorney, without counsel, against Aaron's pleas, and told them about his manifesto, which they hadn't previously known of. And that interview is where his life started going downhill fast.
    - eropple 10y ago
      You're being That Guy. Don't be, and never be, That Guy. Please stop.
avenoir 10y ago
> “Every time I look at an old mail, I feel weird, like I prefer the memory I have of a thing than the accurate recording,” he told me. I do have to say when I and my ex broke it off, reading that first conversation logged in my Facebook chat between the two of us was a total bitch to swallow. Everything was there. Every single word. Nothing's faded into distant memory. There we were 2 years ago happy that we've met each other. Here we are now - complete strangers to each other. It is definitely a weird feeling.
- groby_b 10y ago
  It gets weirder as the weight of the past accumulates. There are some bad experiences I have only recorded in analog form. Throwing out that "evidence" was extremely liberating. There are others that exist online, forever. A constant record of horrible experiences, never to be dulled by the fog that's cast over distant memories. As a result, I've pretty much left the online services where these memories are preserved. These days, I write letters. Actual paper. With an enveloped sealed with wax, using a signet ring, because I'm a romantic ;) Pictures I love are printed and hung. It feels more... well, if not human, certainly humane. (I'm still active online. Obviously. Just more judiciously. The more personal it is, the less likely it is online)
  - ashark 10y ago
    Digital memories are so nice in many ways (backups so a fire doesn't destroy them, with care they'll more or less never degrade, they take up little space, and so on) but they're also burdensome—they seem to multiply endlessly since storage is dirt cheap and takes little space, so that it becomes difficult to sift through to find what you want, favorites that you look at again and again (as in the case of photos) rarely arise because there are just so many, ensuring it's all backed up, finding a way to make it organized, and doing those things without handing all your data to private spy agencies all take time and ongoing effort. It's difficult even to find time to edit the record so it's manageable—and can you, anyway? Can you delete 95% of the photos of your kids, or that loved one you lost, or whoever? Even if you know the idea of looking through them for pleasure or nostalgia brings on anxiety because there are so many, and you never got around to tagging everyone in them or adding those notes you wanted to, and oh no you've forgotten most of what you were going to write, and so on? Looking at them becomes or reminds one of work and you'd actually enjoy them more if there were far fewer of them, but can you delete them? What about your email archive from 20 years ago? You know there are emails you'd love to read again in there, but now you need to find a program to read the file, and go through deleting the 99% you don't care about at all, and there's still a lot, so now you're going through one-by-one to decide whether "hey, wanna meet for lunch?" from a now-dead loved one is worth keeping. And you've got several "misc/laptop_backup/documents/old_files_from_zip_disks"-type directories to go through one of these days when you find the time (will you, ever?). All this for a bunch of junk that will plummet in value to anyone as soon as you die and have nearly zero value to anyone in the world (except maybe as raw data for some damned machine learning program) at most 150 years from now. And when you die you'll burden your friends and relatives with the same data management mess you've mostly-failed to deal with—on top of their own.
peter_l_downs 10y ago
Wow, strange to see this here. I created a photo series with a very similar title ("Love in the Age of Strong Cryptography"): http://freezine.xyz/0/love-in-the-age-of-strong-cryptography/index.html http://freezine.xyz/0/love-in-the-age-of-strong-cryptography...
- mirimir 10y ago
  So those are the actual messages? I've seen GnuPG-encrypted conversations in "private" Craigslist channels. But no background images, of course. So exchanges are public, but only readable by participants.
  - peter_l_downs 10y ago
    Yes, exactly. The goal is to emphasize that two people in a relationship share something that cannot be understood by others. It's not very deep :)
    - mirimir 10y ago
      Yeah, but it is cool :) At some point, with better technology and bandwidth, those could be thoughts, or even shared reality.
- jdormit 10y ago
  Beautiful series! Very moving, although I couldn't tell you exactly why.
- dom0 10y ago
  I don't trust computers enough to freely publish encrypted private communications. That being said, I avoid private communication through or near computers when possible.
  - montycantsin 10y ago
    Fuck HN
mirimir 10y ago
That is just so sweet :) I have some long-term online friends. Mostly totally anonymous. But none romantic. I don't even for sure know gender for some of them. It doesn't really matter.
florianp 10y ago
Interesting and well written but I can only disagree with the author. A few months ago, I read the love letters my grand grandfather wrote to my grand grandmother when he was at war. I seriously doubt anyone will be able to read the emails I write in 70 years. Besides most of intellectuals of the past centuries were prolific in sending letters to their relatives and we know a lot from them through these letters. I don't expect the same to happen with contemporary writers. Maybe our grand children will be able to get a few pictures from us, that were printed and stored safely...
- bryondowd 10y ago
  What makes you think digital content won't be preserved in quantity/quality comparable to printed/handwritten content of earlier times? Perhaps private messages and emails are less likely to be preserved after the account-holder is deceased, but pretty much everything you do publicly on Facebook is preserved and accessible to others after your death in a memorialized account. It's not hard to believe that our descendants will be able to casually search through our daily musings and pictures of our dinners and whatnot, either on Facebook if it still exists, or an archived version of it captured before the site is taken down/replaced. I also wouldn't rule out more private writings finding their way along in some form or another. People are often sentimental and keep things that belonged to their loved ones. I recall reading a story not long ago of a man who kept his father's video game save files, with the suggestion that he may try passing them on to his children.
  - stinkytaco 10y ago
    But will Facebook exist in 70 years time? Or will it go the way of so many other services. I wonder if the AOL chats I had 20 years ago are somewhere? Or the forum posts on long defunct communities? Or the IRC chats. Now, I want to be clear that many of these things shouldn't be saved. I don't believe that the Internet should be archived, but rather that with physical media the choice is simple: save it or throw it. With the Internet there is less choice and what exists is complex and sometimes out of your control.
peterwwillis 10y ago
OTR: the secure messaging protocol for cypherpunk hipsters. OTR is useful if you go to great lengths to exchange public keys, and as soon as the key changes you go through all of it again. (I don't really count shared secrets as a secure means of authenticating your key, since if you have the shared secret, the key can be substituted and thus is irrelevant) That's probably fine if you're just chatting aimlessly and don't need to rely on secure communication regularly. But it's a pain in the ass if you wanted to rely on it for remote long-term secure communication. "Privacy" is about all it's useful for (assuming more attacks aren't found in the protocol). (Side note: to defeat all this complicated encryption and expose identities, just become a member of the hacker community. They're quite gossipy)
- tptacek 10y ago
  First: OTR has been pretty resilient, cryptographically speaking. And from a code quality perspective, libotr gets a lot of shit, but I won a $1000 bet with Matthew Green that nobody would find a sev:hi flaw in it for an entire year, and despite stirring the shit on Twitter about the bet, nobody found anything. I wouldn't use OTR today, but in 2011, when this story started, libotr wasn't a weird recommendation.
  - peterwwillis 10y ago
    I remember testing the plugin when it was first released for gaim. I certainly thought it was weird, and a bit buggy. Version 1 had plenty of holes. Later (including when it was used by the author) version 2 had more holes. So I don't really buy the idea that "stirring the shit on Twitter" for a grand would be enough to get serious research done - and then published - to expose this fledgling protocol's newest bugs. It wasn't a weird recommendation for a cypherpunk, of course, which is what i'm really saying. It's a hipster messaging protocol.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      I don't think this is a reasonable way to sum up OTR, and I also suspect you're conflating the security of the libotr C plugin itself with the security of the protocol. I don't think $1000 is a lot for a libotr bet, but from the caliber of people who submitted attempts to end the bet (almost all of which were libpurple problems), I'm satisfied that it got quite a bit of attention.
nikcub 10y ago
The era where all of our conversations and online interactions are recorded forever started in the mid 00's and ended in the last few years as apps defaulted to ephemerality, end to end encryption and no logging That <decade is a short period in most of our lifetimes, and a blip in the context of government regulation So how is love in the age of cryptography? Exactly the same as love was in the 1990s, and the 1980s, and the 70s, and the 60s ..
- newscracker 10y ago
  > The era where all of our conversations and online interactions are recorded forever started in the mid 00's and ended in the last few years as apps defaulted to ephemerality, end to end encryption and no logging Which apps defaulted to ephemeral storage (other than Snapchat)? And how do we know if the ephemerality is only in our view or applies to the underlying data stored (in other words, how do we know our data is truly deleted vs. being hidden from our view, used for devious purposes without us knowing)? Also, where are the social apps with no logging? All the popular social communication platforms seem to want to hoard every bit of data we can feed them and never want to delete those at their end.
JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
When I look back in my gmail I'm always glad it kept record of times and snapshots of my life and conversations with those I love. I understand encryption to prevent an outsider seeing in, but I'm glad I didn't go to their extremes to leave no trace whatsoever. In this age of no printed photos, our digital traces are all we often have to remember our life. You forget so much, and when you go back, you remember so many things you had forgotten and see so many things you remembered wrong.

256 points by keehun 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dom0 10y ago

Recommended Soundtrack for reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99h6iPRPN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99h6iPRPN8 (Ludovico Einaudi - Elements)

UnpossibleJim 10y ago

I actual enjoyed this article and, more broadly, the subject of the governance of love. How much intrusion into our private (truly private) lives is enough? Are relationships, to a point, meant to be held in the public eye or can they be private? Granted, I'm a bit paranoid and pretty private. I've had a Facebook account in the past, but only used it to poke fun at people, but didn't care for the inevitable drama that followed (turns out, when you have a laugh at someone's outlandish political views face to face, you'll be fine but online, with those same friends, they view that interaction completely different). Obviously, by this small sampling of my personal self, I don't think highly of a governmental intrusion into personal relationships, but I'm pragmatic enough to understand their documentation and categorization. So I ask you this, HN. How much governmental intrusion into our private lives in enough? Also, how much intrusion into our personal lives do you think a semi-connected group of peers (our Facebook "friends") should get?

shrimp_emoji 10y ago
Both Facebook and relationships are for jive normies.
tgragnato 10y ago
Personally, I don't fear being snooped on or to have my comms eavesdropped. What I really fear is the interpretation perpetrated by whatever machine or whoever live-being. The view that more information produces better decisions is at odds with the world around us. What has always made a difference is our `incomprehensible` capacity to grasp someone with our emotional intelligence. Until there will not exist digital computers equipped with (digital) mirror neurons, until people will not think to empathy as something prioritized to a bunch of data, I'm not going to accept the judgment of none.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  There's an excellent episode of Star Trek Voyager where the Borg crewmate Seven of Nine installs a component into her brain that lets her sift through Voyager's immense dataset, and results in her secretly telling the first officer that she believes that the captain is a part of a grand and dark conspiracy. Then she runs the dataset again, and goes to the captain to say the exact same thing about the first officer.

tptacek 10y ago

In which a reporter falls in love with a fellow nerd she meets at a European hackerspace, maintains a long-distance relationship by messaging using showily bad file encryption, decides to move to Europe to cohabitate, and, lacking Facebook profiles to verify the relationship, relies on the testimony of friends and other anecdotal evidence sources, like hundreds of millions of other couples whose lives are imperfectly recorded by social networks. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, eat your heart out.

dsacco 10y ago
> like hundreds of millions of other couples whose lives are imperfectly recorded by social networks. Big, if true.
ngnorton 10y ago
You forgot to pitch Signal.
michel-slm 10y ago
what's showily bad about Jabber + OTR? Kind of curious, I know there are security issues with older OTR versions but is there a known weakness in v3?
- tptacek 10y ago
  Not the Jabber/OTR thing. The decentralized nature of Jabber was pretty overblown, more something she wanted to be true and meaningful than something that actually was meaningful, but: whatever, it's 2011 at that point. It's the OpenSSL command line that I'm taking issue with.
  - tricolon 10y ago
    In the interest of learning, what's the issue with the OpenSSL command?
    - tptacek 10y ago

jawns 10y ago

A little bit about the author, Quinn Norton, for those who are unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_Norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_Norton She mentions in the article that "I came to the attention of a media storm after being struck by a tragedy. My life imploded, and between grieving and dealing with media controversy, my days became a sickening tragicomedy I couldn’t turn off." Could it have been this? > Norton dated Aaron Swartz for three years. Articles in The Atlantic and in New York Magazine indicate that she was pressured by prosecutors to offer information or testimony that could be used against Swartz, but that she denied having information that supported prosecutors' claims of criminal intentions on Swartz's part. Prosecutors nevertheless attempted to use a public blog post on Swartz's blog that Norton mentioned, which may or may not have been co-authored by Swartz, as proof of a criminal intent.

apozem 10y ago
As someone who's followed Norton's work for several years- yes, that seems like the most likely cause. She appears in the documentary about Aaron Swartz, "The Internet's Own Boy," and by her own account greatly struggled with that whole tragedy. It's a damn shame, in the least part because she is a superb writer. Her eulogy for Occupy Wall Street is a sprawling, stunning work of journalism. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/ https://www.wired.com/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/
- killjoywashere 10y ago
  Note: in less kind light: this is the same Quinn Norton who burned Aaron Swartz when she voluntarily went to an "interview" with the US attorney, without counsel, against Aaron's pleas, and told them about his manifesto, which they hadn't previously known of. And that interview is where his life started going downhill fast.
  - eropple 10y ago
    You're being That Guy. Don't be, and never be, That Guy. Please stop.

avenoir 10y ago

> “Every time I look at an old mail, I feel weird, like I prefer the memory I have of a thing than the accurate recording,” he told me. I do have to say when I and my ex broke it off, reading that first conversation logged in my Facebook chat between the two of us was a total bitch to swallow. Everything was there. Every single word. Nothing's faded into distant memory. There we were 2 years ago happy that we've met each other. Here we are now - complete strangers to each other. It is definitely a weird feeling.

groby_b 10y ago
It gets weirder as the weight of the past accumulates. There are some bad experiences I have only recorded in analog form. Throwing out that "evidence" was extremely liberating. There are others that exist online, forever. A constant record of horrible experiences, never to be dulled by the fog that's cast over distant memories. As a result, I've pretty much left the online services where these memories are preserved. These days, I write letters. Actual paper. With an enveloped sealed with wax, using a signet ring, because I'm a romantic ;) Pictures I love are printed and hung. It feels more... well, if not human, certainly humane. (I'm still active online. Obviously. Just more judiciously. The more personal it is, the less likely it is online)
- ashark 10y ago
  Digital memories are so nice in many ways (backups so a fire doesn't destroy them, with care they'll more or less never degrade, they take up little space, and so on) but they're also burdensome—they seem to multiply endlessly since storage is dirt cheap and takes little space, so that it becomes difficult to sift through to find what you want, favorites that you look at again and again (as in the case of photos) rarely arise because there are just so many, ensuring it's all backed up, finding a way to make it organized, and doing those things without handing all your data to private spy agencies all take time and ongoing effort. It's difficult even to find time to edit the record so it's manageable—and can you, anyway? Can you delete 95% of the photos of your kids, or that loved one you lost, or whoever? Even if you know the idea of looking through them for pleasure or nostalgia brings on anxiety because there are so many, and you never got around to tagging everyone in them or adding those notes you wanted to, and oh no you've forgotten most of what you were going to write, and so on? Looking at them becomes or reminds one of work and you'd actually enjoy them more if there were far fewer of them, but can you delete them? What about your email archive from 20 years ago? You know there are emails you'd love to read again in there, but now you need to find a program to read the file, and go through deleting the 99% you don't care about at all, and there's still a lot, so now you're going through one-by-one to decide whether "hey, wanna meet for lunch?" from a now-dead loved one is worth keeping. And you've got several "misc/laptop_backup/documents/old_files_from_zip_disks"-type directories to go through one of these days when you find the time (will you, ever?). All this for a bunch of junk that will plummet in value to anyone as soon as you die and have nearly zero value to anyone in the world (except maybe as raw data for some damned machine learning program) at most 150 years from now. And when you die you'll burden your friends and relatives with the same data management mess you've mostly-failed to deal with—on top of their own.

peter_l_downs 10y ago

Wow, strange to see this here. I created a photo series with a very similar title ("Love in the Age of Strong Cryptography"): http://freezine.xyz/0/love-in-the-age-of-strong-cryptography/index.html http://freezine.xyz/0/love-in-the-age-of-strong-cryptography...

mirimir 10y ago
So those are the actual messages? I've seen GnuPG-encrypted conversations in "private" Craigslist channels. But no background images, of course. So exchanges are public, but only readable by participants.
- peter_l_downs 10y ago
  Yes, exactly. The goal is to emphasize that two people in a relationship share something that cannot be understood by others. It's not very deep :)
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Yeah, but it is cool :) At some point, with better technology and bandwidth, those could be thoughts, or even shared reality.
jdormit 10y ago
Beautiful series! Very moving, although I couldn't tell you exactly why.
dom0 10y ago
I don't trust computers enough to freely publish encrypted private communications. That being said, I avoid private communication through or near computers when possible.
- montycantsin 10y ago
  Fuck HN

mirimir 10y ago

That is just so sweet :) I have some long-term online friends. Mostly totally anonymous. But none romantic. I don't even for sure know gender for some of them. It doesn't really matter.

florianp 10y ago

Interesting and well written but I can only disagree with the author. A few months ago, I read the love letters my grand grandfather wrote to my grand grandmother when he was at war. I seriously doubt anyone will be able to read the emails I write in 70 years. Besides most of intellectuals of the past centuries were prolific in sending letters to their relatives and we know a lot from them through these letters. I don't expect the same to happen with contemporary writers. Maybe our grand children will be able to get a few pictures from us, that were printed and stored safely...

bryondowd 10y ago
What makes you think digital content won't be preserved in quantity/quality comparable to printed/handwritten content of earlier times? Perhaps private messages and emails are less likely to be preserved after the account-holder is deceased, but pretty much everything you do publicly on Facebook is preserved and accessible to others after your death in a memorialized account. It's not hard to believe that our descendants will be able to casually search through our daily musings and pictures of our dinners and whatnot, either on Facebook if it still exists, or an archived version of it captured before the site is taken down/replaced. I also wouldn't rule out more private writings finding their way along in some form or another. People are often sentimental and keep things that belonged to their loved ones. I recall reading a story not long ago of a man who kept his father's video game save files, with the suggestion that he may try passing them on to his children.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  But will Facebook exist in 70 years time? Or will it go the way of so many other services. I wonder if the AOL chats I had 20 years ago are somewhere? Or the forum posts on long defunct communities? Or the IRC chats. Now, I want to be clear that many of these things shouldn't be saved. I don't believe that the Internet should be archived, but rather that with physical media the choice is simple: save it or throw it. With the Internet there is less choice and what exists is complex and sometimes out of your control.

peterwwillis 10y ago

OTR: the secure messaging protocol for cypherpunk hipsters. OTR is useful if you go to great lengths to exchange public keys, and as soon as the key changes you go through all of it again. (I don't really count shared secrets as a secure means of authenticating your key, since if you have the shared secret, the key can be substituted and thus is irrelevant) That's probably fine if you're just chatting aimlessly and don't need to rely on secure communication regularly. But it's a pain in the ass if you wanted to rely on it for remote long-term secure communication. "Privacy" is about all it's useful for (assuming more attacks aren't found in the protocol). (Side note: to defeat all this complicated encryption and expose identities, just become a member of the hacker community. They're quite gossipy)

tptacek 10y ago
First: OTR has been pretty resilient, cryptographically speaking. And from a code quality perspective, libotr gets a lot of shit, but I won a $1000 bet with Matthew Green that nobody would find a sev:hi flaw in it for an entire year, and despite stirring the shit on Twitter about the bet, nobody found anything. I wouldn't use OTR today, but in 2011, when this story started, libotr wasn't a weird recommendation.
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  I remember testing the plugin when it was first released for gaim. I certainly thought it was weird, and a bit buggy. Version 1 had plenty of holes. Later (including when it was used by the author) version 2 had more holes. So I don't really buy the idea that "stirring the shit on Twitter" for a grand would be enough to get serious research done - and then published - to expose this fledgling protocol's newest bugs. It wasn't a weird recommendation for a cypherpunk, of course, which is what i'm really saying. It's a hipster messaging protocol.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I don't think this is a reasonable way to sum up OTR, and I also suspect you're conflating the security of the libotr C plugin itself with the security of the protocol. I don't think $1000 is a lot for a libotr bet, but from the caliber of people who submitted attempts to end the bet (almost all of which were libpurple problems), I'm satisfied that it got quite a bit of attention.

nikcub 10y ago

The era where all of our conversations and online interactions are recorded forever started in the mid 00's and ended in the last few years as apps defaulted to ephemerality, end to end encryption and no logging That <decade is a short period in most of our lifetimes, and a blip in the context of government regulation So how is love in the age of cryptography? Exactly the same as love was in the 1990s, and the 1980s, and the 70s, and the 60s ..

newscracker 10y ago
> The era where all of our conversations and online interactions are recorded forever started in the mid 00's and ended in the last few years as apps defaulted to ephemerality, end to end encryption and no logging Which apps defaulted to ephemeral storage (other than Snapchat)? And how do we know if the ephemerality is only in our view or applies to the underlying data stored (in other words, how do we know our data is truly deleted vs. being hidden from our view, used for devious purposes without us knowing)? Also, where are the social apps with no logging? All the popular social communication platforms seem to want to hoard every bit of data we can feed them and never want to delete those at their end.

JohnJamesRambo 10y ago

When I look back in my gmail I'm always glad it kept record of times and snapshots of my life and conversations with those I love. I understand encryption to prevent an outsider seeing in, but I'm glad I didn't go to their extremes to leave no trace whatsoever. In this age of no printed photos, our digital traces are all we often have to remember our life. You forget so much, and when you go back, you remember so many things you had forgotten and see so many things you remembered wrong.