Monoculture / Guild

[lrk]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 03:34:35PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
> > ... it does look very much from the outside that there is an
> > informal "Cryptographers Guild" in place...
> 
> The Guild, such as it is, is a meritocracy; many previously unknown
> people have joined it since I started watching it in about 1990.
> 
> The way to tell who's in the Guild is that they can break your protocols
> or algorithms, but you can't break theirs.

The problem with guilds is that they become set in their ways. Ask here
how the fact that "not all large numbers are hard to factor" affects RSA
and you will be ignored or dismissed. Ask whether cubic meters of special
hardware could brute-force keys better than the same cubic meters of super
computers and you get the same.

As a perineal outsider, I notice this in several fields. I'm not in the
guild for measuring the Specific Gravity of Gases. Which is precisely why
my name is on the patent for the smallest machine (4,677,841).


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| Lyn Kennedy    E-mail       | crypto at ovillatx.sytes.net               |
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