[rektide]

I like the idea floated here- cypherpunks won, and that there are new futures to be seized.

Overall, the most cypherpunk thing I can suggest to people who want to move things forwards- ignore cypherpunk. Figure out how to get people orchestrating and controlling their own host of devices among them and their friends. Break down the walls between local devices, string up some lines, and get people experimenting with managing, sharing and pooling their local resources.

We need whetted appetites for human control of the wider systems. We need people who want to harness their many systems (as opposed to be harnessed to your applications, subject to it's designed fancy), we need people interested in repurposing/reconnecting things as their environment changes. We need whetted appetites for sovereign control over all of one's devices. Empower and more so interest people in seizing the device and put it in it's role among the person's world, and cryptography will be just a facet of that great manifest will we've reawoken.

If you want to be a cypherpunk, be a cypherpunk tomorrow. Today, be a ubiquitous computer systems liberator.

[hershel]

If we're talking about privacy, even fully securing a single device per person would be highly usefull and should not be dependent on what is the status of other devices.

[rektide]

Actually, no: we're not talking about privacy here. I was asserting how incredibly boring privacy is today, and how we should stop talking about it because it's boring (except to me and you and our small cadre of crypherpunk friends) and we're locked out of understanding it in practice:

If you don't own the software (no one does), don't have control over it's behavior (no one does) and cannot see it's data (no one can), grappling with and understanding control over the channels can only be done in the extreme abstract. Sovereign computing proposes reversing the former, and giving people direct systems control, sharing, and orchestration capabilities. Ubiquotous computing proposes taking these exposed raw capabilities, and making them broadly and generally machine-to-machine.

I hadn't mentioned that cypherpunks have been extremely in the spot light, c/o anonymous (w/ major recent busts), silk road (busted), and that guy no longer in America; all of which are keeping cypherpunkery in the spotlight of late. I hadn't mentioned privacy; PGP, TLS, OpenVPN, & the only new and shiny on the block onion routing. Because I don't think privacy will have the public consciousness. Because privacy today means turning over whatever rocks Facebooks decides to leave out for you to turn over, and that's not useful. If crypto wants focus, it needs to actively support a counter SaaSS world, it needs to focus on creating new capabilities directly usable by individuals for interacting with other individuals.

[TheLegace]

Thanks, but as much I'd like to agree with opening things up, I don't think we have to give up our privacy or security for it.

By that exact same definition of software being interoperable and "aware" doesn't mean we have to expose our privacy. This may not be a popular option, but free(or paid) web services should allow us to store our own data, our own emails but make available interfaces and convenience of accessing our own stored data elsewhere.

The vast majority of people obviously do not care or even understand, they can happily choose to host on the cloud. I'm not letting my mom decide what Internet security and privacy laws should be. She cannot even comprehend what the implications of Facebook are.

I'd also like to mention not everyone lives in the hunky dory developed world where we're free to have opinions(debatable) and violent oppression is frowned upon.

The vast majority of the world does not live that way and has a lot of hardships to go through. Exposing their ability of free expression could hinder their ability to better their lives and maybe one day us.