This is likely the finest case for electronic privacy I have encountered and is worth reading.

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

by Eric Hughes

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.

Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.

Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one’s identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor’s younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.

Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.

For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.

The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.

Onward.

Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>

9 March 1993

Do you use Dropbox? Have you read their new recently changed TOS? The following quote is from their “Your Stuff & Your Privacy” section and seems to me to have some far reaching implications that could cause some users major legal trouble. Particularly the last sentence of the quote. Think about that and the stuff you have in your folders. Additionally, the bulk of the statement regarding granting them sublicenseable rights undoubtedly relates to them making your data visible to you and those you share your information with. I suspect that this is with the best of intentions and results in broad language recommended by lawyers but, it is not restricted in any way. So the result is that it matters not what their intentions for your “stuff” are. They can do what they want with it. Just imagine if Facebook buys Dropbox at some point.

My opinion is, be informed and be cautious. It’s ok to use these services but only once you understand the consequences of doing so.

We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files). By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service. You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.

Distributed computing is very much just what it soulds like. There are a number of reasons to utilize such strategies but the most popular is to achieve a greater amount of data processing in a given amount of time. Back in December of 2008 I wrote about how I had participated in the SETI@home project and then subsequently switched to the Folding@home project. Both of the projects are excellent examples of distributed computing. What I find most interesting about these projects is that they are using the power of distributed computing to analyze data that has already been obtained, rather than producing new data. In the case of SETI, they are able to use various radio telescopes the gather data from distant space in huge quantities. That data is then divided into very small pieces for each distributed client to analyze. Similarly, Folding@home uses the power of distribution to run protein folding simulations for far longer that was previously practical. The Folding@home Wikipedia page has some facts about the amazing amount of processing power of the Folding volunteer network. It runs in the multiples faster than the most powerful single computer in the world.

Below is a video of a protein folding simulation.

This precisely the type of work that your computer can contribute to the Folding project if you download and run the client. Many of us have computers that sit powered on all day and most of that time they are idle or using only a fraction of their processing power. Why not put that power to good use for a good cause?

I like this. I particularly like the idea of this being able to form a mesh. In my opinion it will be the mesh network that we will eventually rely on for the free dissemination of information. There are many other projects out there that can be aggregated to form the mesh. I mentioned the mesh-potato in the past. There are also many consumer grade wireless routers that can be adapted to the mesh task with freely available custom firmware. I use the WRT54GL and Tomato at home now. Its brilliant.

Here are some other mesh network related sites:

• Roofnet at MIT
• Wing Project
• Meraki
• SMesh

Back in the late 90’s when the WWW and the “Information Superhighway” were all over the news and everyone was getting an email address (remember Compuserve and Earthlink and AOL), Linux was also gaining traction because it provided so much of the back-end to the internet. A small group of engineers put their heads together and started the Cobalt company. Their history is available here. Their first product called the Qube 2700 shipped in March of 1998. It was soon upgraded to the Qube 2 and then later the the Cache Qube and Qube 3. There were also a few other products developed for the datacenter/ISP industry, those were the CacheRaq the NasRaq and a series of other Raq* devices. These were all 1U form factor, low power, low cost, rack ready appliances that allowed fast deployment of ISP type services to customers.

I can’t find the original order so I don’t know the exact date but I think it was around late 1999 that I ordered the Qube2. I have always enjoyed tech-gadgets and computers and I just loved these things from the moment I saw one. I set it up at the office in Hackensack where it was connected to our wicked-fast 768Kbps DSL line (now we have 25/25Mbps Fiber). It really had to be the coolest computer you could buy at the time, with its deep cobalt blue case and green Cylon style LED on the front and its diminutive footprint. And best of all it ran Linux. And second best of all it had an unusual 64bit 250Mhz MIPSel processor inside. It really was unique and so much fun to look at and use. I have a soft spot for that one too because it ran our hx4.com site for years.

I still have that Qube2 and two others that I have since obtained through eBay over the last 10 years. The most recent of which was practically a steal (for a fanboy). I was fortunate to happen upon an auction for a NIB Qube2 model in its original packaging, unopened plastic seal on the Qube2 and all the accessories and the original product sticker still intact on the box, all for $33.00. I’m still stoked about it.

Unfortunately these are obsolete and not good for much other that to serve as neat looking bookends and as conversation pieces. They indeed do still run and there is a community of enthusiasts as you can see from the links above. I have installed NetBSD 5.1 on two of them and that at least makes them current as far as the operating system goes but they are doggedly slow by todays standards and it can get tiresome trying to do anything productive on them. At this point I couldn’t see one serving much purpose other than perhaps for running a persistent instance of IRSSI under Gnu/screen or something similar. One of these days I think I will attempt to gut one of them and stuff a Nano/ITX system inside that will have all the comforts of modern hardware. They still look amazingly current.