Your unsupported claim that the "majority of cryptographic transmissions are for child pornography and drug purchases" is insanely wrong.
Given the default use of HTTPS by Google, Hotmail (Live.com), Twitter and most recently Facebook, it is almost certain that the legitimate traffic to/from those sites vastly outnumbers, by several orders of magnitude, whatever encrypted data is sent by folks exchanging child pornography images or buying drugs via silk road.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You are exactly the kind of CS professor I'm glad I never had. You failed to read everything and care more about politics than quality of code and safety of users (k now im just trolling, sorry but read the actual replies)
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
This was uncivil. I doubt you would say that to his face. Comments like this are likely to get flagged, and if it happens enough, your account will get banned. It doesn't matter how good of a programmer you are, or how impolite RMS and Theo are.
Obviously I'm not arguing that Syrians who have access to computers shouldn't get to use crypto, or that there has never been a Syrian who used crypto to aid in protest. But let's not act like crypto's main usage is as righteous as helping a rebellion against an oppressive regime.
You realise that cryptocat isn't marketing itself as a chat client for paedophiles and drug users, but for activists in oppressive regimes, right?
Here's one example from their blog:
> In working with young and middle-aged professionals in the Middle East region, we have discovered that desktop OTR clients suffer from serious usability issues which are sometimes further exacerbated due to language differences and lack of cultural integration (the technology was frequently described as “foreign”). In one case, an activist who was fully trained to use Pidgin-OTR neglected to do so citing usability difficulties, and as a direct consequence encountered a life-threatening situation at the hands of a national military in the Middle East and North Africa region.
That's why people keep talking about the risk from foreign governments - because the cryptocat hype keeps mentioning governments.
> Almost all security/crypto projects are open source. There's no money involved, therefore no corporate sensitivity training or social skills needed. What's needed is secure code to stop governments from rounding up Syrian and Bahraini dissidents and drilling holes into their knees during interrogation because they were duped into trusting cryptocat while planning their democracy protests.
> What's needed is secure code to stop governments from rounding up Syrian and Bahraini dissidents and drilling holes into their knees during interrogation because they were duped into trusting cryptocat while planning their democracy protests.
Oh, get over yourself. We all know the vast majority of online cryptographic transmissions are for child pornography and drug purchases. Don't act like Syrian rebels actually use these technologies when most of them don't even have access to a computer, let alone the knowledge of how to use one.
This is seriously the problem. You sit there and think modern cryptography is something other than a rich white guy's game, as though it's nothing but a Righteous Endeavor, so you get to treat other people like shit. The fact that the paragraph before that one is all about how you're getting drunk at some invite-only German hackathon is proof enough.