4 ms·

I wonder what other institutions are infested with swarms of gadflies that'll all swear up and down in unison that something is definitely good or bad, will att

I wonder what other institutions are infested with swarms of gadflies that'll all swear up and down in unison that something is definitely good or bad, will attack outsiders with narratives that disagree with their own, and weaken the credibility of the entire institution in the process. Surely this can't be a phenomenon unique to technology, can it?

happytiger 3y ago
https://youtu.be/URdXC6UtfVg?si=b7uwjHujUvYG1hGH https://youtu.be/URdXC6UtfVg?si=b7uwjHujUvYG1hGH Skip to 1 minute in and you’ll see the problem in experimental form.
tptacek 3y ago
It's just human nature. I refuse to participate in standards work, partly because it's much more pleasant throwing rocks from a safe distance, but also because I recognize in myself the same ordinary frailties that had friends of the original IPSEC standards authors writing mailing list posts about Rogaway being a "supposed" cryptographer. There but for the grace of not joining standards lists go I. I think --- I am not kidding here, I believe this sincerely --- the correct conclusion is community-driven cryptographic standards organizations are a force for evil. Curve25519 is a good standard. So is Noise, so is WireGuard. None of those were developed in a standards organization. It's hard to think of a good cryptosystem that was. TLS? It took decades --- bad decades --- to get to 1.3. Of that outcome, I believe it was Watson Ladd who said that if you turned it in as the "secure transport" homework in your undergraduate cryptography class, you'd get a B.
- dboreham 3y ago
  TLS originated at Netscape.
  - sitkack 3y ago
    So did Js, it isn’t a counter argument. Many of the gadflies are useful idiots.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  It goes further back than crypto: back in the day, there was the design-by-committee OSI versus the "rough consensus and running code" IETF. The result is that while we still teach the OSI 7-layer model in universities, in practice we use TCP/IP, often with HTTP and TLS on top.
zdragnar 3y ago
You're basically describing politics, where specific opinions are central to a group identity. So long as there is an innate human desire to belong, there will be plenty of people who are happy to live with any amount of cognitive dissonance. Joining a gadfly swarm just gives them an opportunity to prove their worth to the group.

happytiger 3y ago

https://youtu.be/URdXC6UtfVg?si=b7uwjHujUvYG1hGH https://youtu.be/URdXC6UtfVg?si=b7uwjHujUvYG1hGH Skip to 1 minute in and you’ll see the problem in experimental form.

tptacek 3y ago

It's just human nature. I refuse to participate in standards work, partly because it's much more pleasant throwing rocks from a safe distance, but also because I recognize in myself the same ordinary frailties that had friends of the original IPSEC standards authors writing mailing list posts about Rogaway being a "supposed" cryptographer. There but for the grace of not joining standards lists go I. I think --- I am not kidding here, I believe this sincerely --- the correct conclusion is community-driven cryptographic standards organizations are a force for evil. Curve25519 is a good standard. So is Noise, so is WireGuard. None of those were developed in a standards organization. It's hard to think of a good cryptosystem that was. TLS? It took decades --- bad decades --- to get to 1.3. Of that outcome, I believe it was Watson Ladd who said that if you turned it in as the "secure transport" homework in your undergraduate cryptography class, you'd get a B.

dboreham 3y ago
TLS originated at Netscape.
- sitkack 3y ago
  So did Js, it isn’t a counter argument. Many of the gadflies are useful idiots.
red_admiral 3y ago
It goes further back than crypto: back in the day, there was the design-by-committee OSI versus the "rough consensus and running code" IETF. The result is that while we still teach the OSI 7-layer model in universities, in practice we use TCP/IP, often with HTTP and TLS on top.

zdragnar 3y ago

You're basically describing politics, where specific opinions are central to a group identity. So long as there is an innate human desire to belong, there will be plenty of people who are happy to live with any amount of cognitive dissonance. Joining a gadfly swarm just gives them an opportunity to prove their worth to the group.