10 ms·

It sounds like a majority of the students had no idea what encryption was and because the authority figure (the professor) asked them whether or not it was bad

It sounds like a majority of the students had no idea what encryption was and because the authority figure (the professor) asked them whether or not it was bad they just went with it? I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad.

wyldfire 7y ago
> why people would say mathematical functions are bad. People don't think 'encryption' is a mathematical function. They think it's like a radar detector in your car. "Why would you have it unless you intend on speeding?" [goes their thought process] "Oh I use this frequently and things I do every day would be totally broken without it? Really?!" [is the realization we hope dialogue could bring]
- u801e 7y ago
  Then again, given speeding is so widely accepted, radar detectors are legal to use in 49 out of 50 states. It would be nice if encryption was viewed the same way.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    Isn't (relatively) strong encryption legal in every one of your 50 states and deployed to more than 10^10 devices globally?
    - benignslime 7y ago
      What point are you trying to make? The fucking article posed is about ensuring that is isn't legal.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    No, we absolutely don't want strong encryption viewed as "illegal but accepted", we want it viewed as "absolute necessity for day-to-day life and personal safety, unacceptable to ever weaken".
    - u801e 7y ago
      I think it comes down to popular vote versus government policy. While things like speeding and marijuana are illegal, popular votes have made these things legal (or quasi legal) in their respective jurisdictions. For example, votes to remove speed cameras or make them illegal, or votes to decriminalize marijuana. But you are correct in that we really should make it completely legal so that the government doesn't have an excuse to target individuals for engaging in a practice that is generally widely accepted.
notRobot 7y ago
> I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. That's such a naïve way of putting it. People don't care about the mathematics behind it. They think it's "bad" because they think it enables terrorism and the spread of child sexual abuse imagery or whatever politicians have led them to believe.
- NateEag 7y ago
  Let's be clear - encryption can absolutely enable those things. That is not all it does, but pretending it does not is stupid.
  - lostcolony 7y ago
    The internet enables all of those things too. Before that, telephones and fax machines did. Hospitals enable the spread of disease by clustering all the sick together with a constant flow of healthy people (visitors, doctors, etc). They also enable the development of superbugs. What's your point? You're confusing incidental usage with enablement. The lack of these good things doesn't prevent the occurrence of the evils listed, and to make a conversation one sided for how much it exacerbates the evil without instead focusing on the good and the reason they exist is incredibly disingenuous (which is the clearly the intent of most of the people on a soapbox about the evils)
    - gjs278 7y ago
      the point is that you can track phone calls and fax
grecy 7y ago
> I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. Encryption is more than just mathematical functions, it's the application of mathematical functions. And the application is what matters, because it would be easy to say a Nuclear weapon is just physics or that a bio-weapon is just chemistry. Clearly, how you use basic principles matters.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  It isn't like Nuclear weapons, though, because every single computer has everything you need to do full encryption. Nuclear weapons require materials, manufacturing, etc. Nuclear weapons require both the knowledge and the physical world parts.... encryption just requires the knowledge, which is impossible to put back in the box.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    Every house has the basic materials for a bomb, and many houses have the basic materials for a big bomb (especially if you use fertilizer). The difference is understanding how to use it. Every computer is capable of building software that can bring society to its knees, but most people don't know how to do it. Software is just algorithms, after all. The problem is that law enforcement pushes the bad uses of something without weighing it with the good. If fertilizer can be used to make bombs, should be ban fertilizer? No, that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unfortunately, many voters don't fully understand what the baby is WRT encryption, they just see child porn, human trafficking, etc.
slg 7y ago
Encryption allows data to be locked away from the government including law enforcement and prosecutors in a way that was nearly impossible for the average citizen a few decades ago. Warrants can't break encryption like they could doors or locks. As much of life moves to the digital world and becomes encrypted, that can be a drastic change in how the justice system works. Pro-encryption people need to keep this in mind when talking to anti-encryption folks. Criminals being able to hide evidence is a serious concern for the average person.
- strbean 7y ago
  > in a way that was nearly impossible for the average citizen a few decades ago Ehh, maybe if you are talking about speed and scale. The average citizen could always learn how to use a one-time pad.
  - slg 7y ago
    Speed, scale, and by default with no initial sharing of keys are super important distinctions.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  Why can't the government serve warrants to give up their private keys? I don't really see the State's argument against encryption except in the case that they want to break encrypted information without due process.
  - lostcolony 7y ago
    Well, 5th amendment protections, and inability to determine whether a person even remembers the key, means that serving a warrant doesn't always work either. But then, neither did breaking down the door and ransacking the obvious physical target pre-internet days always work. And everyone understood a suspect had no obligation to tell the feds where he hid the goods.
- feanaro 7y ago
  I always have trouble imagining examples of this kind of evidence that criminals were previously utterly unable to hide but can now do it easily using encryption. It seems any kind of evidence could had just been shredded and burned in times past or hidden in an obscure, physical safe that no one knows about. If anything, the digital age had made the location of evidence more obvious and even produced entirely new kinds of evidence (traffic and connection logs, emails, etc). It seems to me that law enforcement is simply pining for the fjords of a very short time span in human history when ample digital information co-existed with the lack of widely available cryptographic systems.
outworlder 7y ago
I hope those people access their bank over port 80.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  They do, on their open wifi network.
reaperducer 7y ago
I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. Because the vast majority of people don't know that encryption is mathematical formulas. They only know what they see from Hollywood, which is that it's a thing that bad guys use.

wyldfire 7y ago

> why people would say mathematical functions are bad. People don't think 'encryption' is a mathematical function. They think it's like a radar detector in your car. "Why would you have it unless you intend on speeding?" [goes their thought process] "Oh I use this frequently and things I do every day would be totally broken without it? Really?!" [is the realization we hope dialogue could bring]

u801e 7y ago
Then again, given speeding is so widely accepted, radar detectors are legal to use in 49 out of 50 states. It would be nice if encryption was viewed the same way.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  Isn't (relatively) strong encryption legal in every one of your 50 states and deployed to more than 10^10 devices globally?
  - benignslime 7y ago
    What point are you trying to make? The fucking article posed is about ensuring that is isn't legal.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  No, we absolutely don't want strong encryption viewed as "illegal but accepted", we want it viewed as "absolute necessity for day-to-day life and personal safety, unacceptable to ever weaken".
  - u801e 7y ago
    I think it comes down to popular vote versus government policy. While things like speeding and marijuana are illegal, popular votes have made these things legal (or quasi legal) in their respective jurisdictions. For example, votes to remove speed cameras or make them illegal, or votes to decriminalize marijuana. But you are correct in that we really should make it completely legal so that the government doesn't have an excuse to target individuals for engaging in a practice that is generally widely accepted.

notRobot 7y ago

> I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. That's such a naïve way of putting it. People don't care about the mathematics behind it. They think it's "bad" because they think it enables terrorism and the spread of child sexual abuse imagery or whatever politicians have led them to believe.

NateEag 7y ago
Let's be clear - encryption can absolutely enable those things. That is not all it does, but pretending it does not is stupid.
- lostcolony 7y ago
  The internet enables all of those things too. Before that, telephones and fax machines did. Hospitals enable the spread of disease by clustering all the sick together with a constant flow of healthy people (visitors, doctors, etc). They also enable the development of superbugs. What's your point? You're confusing incidental usage with enablement. The lack of these good things doesn't prevent the occurrence of the evils listed, and to make a conversation one sided for how much it exacerbates the evil without instead focusing on the good and the reason they exist is incredibly disingenuous (which is the clearly the intent of most of the people on a soapbox about the evils)
  - gjs278 7y ago
    the point is that you can track phone calls and fax

grecy 7y ago

> I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. Encryption is more than just mathematical functions, it's the application of mathematical functions. And the application is what matters, because it would be easy to say a Nuclear weapon is just physics or that a bio-weapon is just chemistry. Clearly, how you use basic principles matters.

cortesoft 7y ago
It isn't like Nuclear weapons, though, because every single computer has everything you need to do full encryption. Nuclear weapons require materials, manufacturing, etc. Nuclear weapons require both the knowledge and the physical world parts.... encryption just requires the knowledge, which is impossible to put back in the box.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  Every house has the basic materials for a bomb, and many houses have the basic materials for a big bomb (especially if you use fertilizer). The difference is understanding how to use it. Every computer is capable of building software that can bring society to its knees, but most people don't know how to do it. Software is just algorithms, after all. The problem is that law enforcement pushes the bad uses of something without weighing it with the good. If fertilizer can be used to make bombs, should be ban fertilizer? No, that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unfortunately, many voters don't fully understand what the baby is WRT encryption, they just see child porn, human trafficking, etc.

slg 7y ago

Encryption allows data to be locked away from the government including law enforcement and prosecutors in a way that was nearly impossible for the average citizen a few decades ago. Warrants can't break encryption like they could doors or locks. As much of life moves to the digital world and becomes encrypted, that can be a drastic change in how the justice system works. Pro-encryption people need to keep this in mind when talking to anti-encryption folks. Criminals being able to hide evidence is a serious concern for the average person.

strbean 7y ago
> in a way that was nearly impossible for the average citizen a few decades ago Ehh, maybe if you are talking about speed and scale. The average citizen could always learn how to use a one-time pad.
- slg 7y ago
  Speed, scale, and by default with no initial sharing of keys are super important distinctions.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
Why can't the government serve warrants to give up their private keys? I don't really see the State's argument against encryption except in the case that they want to break encrypted information without due process.
- lostcolony 7y ago
  Well, 5th amendment protections, and inability to determine whether a person even remembers the key, means that serving a warrant doesn't always work either. But then, neither did breaking down the door and ransacking the obvious physical target pre-internet days always work. And everyone understood a suspect had no obligation to tell the feds where he hid the goods.
feanaro 7y ago
I always have trouble imagining examples of this kind of evidence that criminals were previously utterly unable to hide but can now do it easily using encryption. It seems any kind of evidence could had just been shredded and burned in times past or hidden in an obscure, physical safe that no one knows about. If anything, the digital age had made the location of evidence more obvious and even produced entirely new kinds of evidence (traffic and connection logs, emails, etc). It seems to me that law enforcement is simply pining for the fjords of a very short time span in human history when ample digital information co-existed with the lack of widely available cryptographic systems.

outworlder 7y ago

I hope those people access their bank over port 80.

brokenmachine 7y ago
They do, on their open wifi network.

reaperducer 7y ago

I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. Because the vast majority of people don't know that encryption is mathematical formulas. They only know what they see from Hollywood, which is that it's a thing that bad guys use.