Comment by busterarm
14 hours ago
I guess tech has grown too large and fractured and maybe most working software engineers are too young to be familiar with phk and his points of view.
He's been a strong privacy and FOSS advocate for decades and has more credibility on both of these topics than nearly anyone on this board.
He also has an account and comments frequently. phkamp. I suggest reading some of his comments before making judgment.
So many kneejerk and nuance-less opinions. Absolutely hilarious that people are thinking the guy who wrote MD5crypt and BSD Jails is anti-privacy.
Also eye opening watching how many people are getting frothing-at-the-mouth mad seeing somebody with that pedigree coming to different conclusions than they do.
Sadly, after the 2024 anti-E2E-messaging piece[1] I do in fact think he’s pretty anti-privacy overall. Perhaps calling that pro-regulation is more correct, but my (non-American) experience over the last, say, twenty years does not include literally a single piece of regulation that traded privacy for more government control (however reasonable) and went well, so, same difference. Accomlished hacker holds some wrong-to-downright-harmful political opinions; wouldn’t be the first time.
[1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3703126
It's extraordinary to me how highly intelligent people can't tell the difference between saying "don't this because people don't have the right to do it" and "don't do this because even if you're correct you'll go to prison for it".
That's the difference he's pointing out in your linked article. There's nothing "anti-E2E" about that piece that he wrote. He says explicitly that people can have whatever standard of encryption they're comfortable with in the post. His piece is entirely about letting all parties to communication decide their limits on privacy. It's a solution that lets people maintain their rights, lets businesses stay compliant with the law and also meets with political reality.
The staunch privacy advocates acting like privacy has to be all or none are right but not in the way they believe. If you continue to build privacy technology where the only option is total privacy then don't be surprised when nation states take all of your privacy away. There's no privacy in prison.
Also you can be totally justified in working on such tools, but western liberal governments will still imprison you for it. Hell, a guy sat in jail for four years just for ignoring a court order to unlock his phone (United States v. Rawls). He won the appeal but still sat in prison and judges can do that. That's kinda the point of the article.
phk is doing nothing more than telling people the temperature of the room outside of their bubble.
I’m mostly seeing people disagree with the substance of his argument, though. Your argument through authority is weak.
Really? I'm overwhelmingly seeing people just complain and call him a crank without really making any arguments. There are some arguments but it isn't the majority of the comments, or even what I was responding to.
Yes, really. It seems you’re seeing what you want to see.