Cringely ToorCon Keynote
September 28th, 2003
Cory Doctorow has posted a rough transcript of Robert X Cringely’s speech to the ToorCon 2003 Information Security Conference. Cringely goes from funny…
I built, by hand, the first 25 Apple ][s, worked on the Lisa’s GUI. I invented the Trashcan Icon.
[…]
When I went to work on the Lisa, I was determined that deleting a file would be a two-step process. On some systems, the trashcan bulges (defies physics); on others, the lid goes off (defies my mother). In my version, a fly circled the trashcan. The focus groups thought it was fuckin’ awesome. But by turning off the fly, the computer could be made to run twice as fast. They fired me.
[…]
…to pretty damn depressing…
I don’t know as much as you know, so I have to look at the big pic from a 30-year perspective.
We once had a dream of ubiquitous infosec: perfect secrecy, anonymity, untraceable e-cash — protect ourselves from censorship, etc. It hasn’t worked. I don’t know that it can ever work. I was the only reporter at the first DefCon — and that’s what people were talking about then.
By contrast, today’s news is a cypherpunk nightmare. Information turns out not to be power, after all: Power is power. Joe user doesn’t want to encrypt email. Anonymity is overwritten by court-order. The Great Firewall of China keeps a billion people from communicating, from knowing what’s going on. In 1997, in Hong Kong, I spoke to the China-Internet people and said, “How do you proxy an entire Internet?” They said, “Well, it might not work, but we’ll just throw all our resources at it until it does.”
[…]
The closest thing to strong security that we are likely to have as a society is Palladium.
That’s horrible.
He’s got that last bit right.
[Via Boing Boing]