Comment by Lerc
8 days ago
I found this amusing.
>P.G.P., a free encryption program used by antinuclear activists and human rights groups to shield their files and emails from government surveillance.
I find it fascinating to see how the users of a program change, based on how a reporter wants to build or diminish.
At least it's going in a positive direction today.
>Water, a drink consumed by nobel price winners and European kings...
Oxygen, an element serial killers need in order to kill again.
Nearly all air molecules were once part of a dinosaur fart.
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[dead]
Dihydrogen monoxide - a constituent of many known toxic substances, diseases and disease-causing agents[0]
[0]: https://www.dhmo.org/
100% of people who've ever had DHMO have died.
This is scientifically verified and yet nobody does anything about it.
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thousands of people die every year from DHMO toxicity, literal overdoses of DHMO, yet you can still find it in baby food and breast milk.
I was alway taught that Adolf Hitler was a prevalent user of dihydrogen monoxide and refused to give it to his captives.
Water? Like, from the toilet?
It's what plants crave.
(I needed to be able to post that to HN tonight.)
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Does it have electrolytes?
Ah yes, the cautionary tale where the leadership is willing to accept their own faults, seeks out the most competent to solve their issue, despite initial reservations are willing to go with the suggestions provided and a public that, upon being provided evidence accepts it. Kinda hopeful, if one thinks about it, the Eugenics nonsense notwithstanding…
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Water? You mean like out of the toilet?
This section stood out to me because it started out explaining PGP to a layman like this, but then the author gets overly excited that a cryptographer would be interested in... basic cryptography
> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. So does Bitcoin. [...]
> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.
Bob uses electricity provided from a coal power plant, therefore he must be able to design a Fission plant. Yeah, these are some massive leaps, the question of why, beyond morbid curiosity, one must dox Satoshi not withstanding. Satoshi or the wallets they controlled were never associated with anything beyond the creation of BTC after all, making the value of knowing who they are or were not really great in my view. If these coins suddenly started funding someone or something, there could be an argument, but this coupled with such a layperson approach makes me doubtful about the ethics or approach.
We also have this gem:
> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
Amazing! I bet they both for loops too! I heard Bitcoin relies heavily on for loops.
Infuriatingly, to people who don't know much about programming, these pieces of 'evidence' might sound quite compelling, because it will all sound equally obscure to them.
I'm only a quarter of the way through this piece, but I'm finding it very hard to take seriously.
It's strange. I'm sure that he talked to experts who would immediately say, yes many programming languages exist. But two cryptographers who wrote money systems both using C++ is not informative. Today maybe we could expect one to use Rust.
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Well .. you probably thought the same when John was unmasking Theranos
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The leaps here would get one laughed out of an early 2k conspiracy forum.
I see your point, but PGP was literally invented by an anti-nuclear activist and intentionally disseminated to human rights groups.
"Created" or "originally used" would be on point, 60 years after the fact it is just slop.
60? Not even 40.
I found that entire section amusing. Some choice quotes:
> So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains.
> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.
> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.
public key encryption and c++! It must be him.
> public key encryption and c++! It must be him.
I'm now worried I've secretly been Satoshi the whole time.
Lmao. I really expected better from the guy who unmasked Theranos.
> I would ping him over the Signal app
Signal, the free encryption app used by journalists
Signal, which shares its name with the propaganda publication of the Third Reich ...
Signal, an App predominantly used by governmental officials to leak war plans or bypass historical recording obligations.
I think it's mind boggling that in 2026 encryption and signing of emails is still not a common thing, only because it's Google's business model to snoop on their users' email. For that reason we can't use email to send sensitive data and need apps for every little thing that could have been an email.
At the same time the dumps of government and corporate emails have been invaluable to society at large. They’ve helped win court cases, uncover corruption, etc.
It's technically true, but it's also a very selective framing
that's such a loaded statement.
This is the power of language.
The bias is built into it.
The New York Times has some great journalists and does important work, but they certainly have an editorial bias/agenda on most topics, even though it's often subtle. People claiming they are neutral on most topics are just not seeing it, because it aligns with their slant. Just saying it's interesting to see when folks notice it or not on hackernews.
PGP was different then. In the 90s the internet was unencrypted and the only people using PGP were those that had a reasonable need for it. However, there were a couple of big problems that the armchair historian would not be aware of.
First off, communicating with PGP was hard. Imagine you are based in London and you want to publish something controversial without getting taken to court. You could email someone in New York and ask them to post your 'hot potato of juiciness'. But, how to you exchange keys without the beloved five eyes seeing what you are up to?
This was in an era when very little was encrypted, so anything encrypted would theoretically get flagged for the three letter agencies to take a look at. Again, this would depend on the person you are trying to reach, if they were working at the equivalent of 'the Iranian embassy' then yeah, good luck with that, you are going to get caught.
The next problem was that PGP was doable for the three letter agencies using what amounts to WW2 Enigma tactics. In period it was possible for them to man-in-the-middle attack an email, to ask the PGP using sender to 'use the right key and resend'. The sender does as told, even with the same, as provided, public key. However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
PGP was originally treated as a 'munition' with export controls. People weren't using PGP for their Uber Eats and Amazon orders, as per the article, it was only anti-government people that needed PGP, that being Western 'five eyes' governments.
Hence, even though it is a tedious NYT article, the author is right about PGP, in period. And, don't ask how I know about how PGP was hacked, there was a certain fog of war that went on at the time.
> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
Could you expand on this please?
They cannot because PGP has no such vulnerability.
You must be joking!
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It was never trivial for TLAs to man-in-the-middle anyone, because PGP users were very much aware of the problem and nothing about key exchange was automated, for good or ill. Key exchange parties, reading out key fingerprints in their own custom extended phonetic alphabet etc.
A man in the middle attack would maybe work in rare cases, at great cost, and then you'd get one or two messages and immediately make people aware that they'd been attacked. It's not worth it. I'm confident the TLAs never bothered to do it against anyone with public keys on a key server, the minimum effort you could make to guard against MITM attacks.
And nowadays, PGP technology is mostly used by the government and military. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the case when Bitcoins was originally developed
Never seen it. What parts? Do you mean PKI?
[Citation needed]
Seriously why would gov use pgp? They would be the last group i would expect to use something like PGP.
Source: I worked two years on GnuPG, which is certified VS-NfD: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geheimhaltungsgrad
"antinuclear activists and human rights groups to shield their files and emails from government surveillance"
You mean the people responsible for not allowing us to embrace Nuclear 30 years before we should have?
Yeah the weird thing about living in a democracy is you have to convince people who don't agree with you to do things. Maybe try better politics rather than attacks or else you'll go another 30 years of no nuclear power then die without realizing your dream of nearly free clean unlimited power.
It’s 10x easier to destroy things and block stuff than it is to build anything.
As witnessed by the US inability to build anything for a generation or two. It’s all NIMBY (or worse) all the time.
Anti-anything is fighting a nearly unwinnable asymmetric political fight these days. Eventually times will get hard enough where this flips, but we are nowhere close to that yet.
> people who don't agree with you to do things.
the problem is that those people who don't agree with me are also not taking the externalized cost of non-action.
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Nuclear restrictions were instituted by beurocratic means, not democratic means.
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No - Zimmerman was an anti nuclear weapons activist with the Nuclear Freeze campaign when he invented PGP.