Chapter 62 12.2 The Fax Machine Effect and the Law of Increasing Returns

Encryption always wins because it fits the logic of the internet.Given an encrypted public key, as long as the time is long enough, it can be cracked with a supercomputer.Those who don't want their codes to be cracked have tried to counter supercomputers by increasing the length of the keys (the longer the key, the harder it is to crack), but at the cost of making the defenses clumsy and sluggish.What's more, given enough money and time, any password can be cracked.As Eric Hughes often reminded his fellow cypherpunks, "Encryption is economics. Encryption is always possible, just expensive." To crack a 120-bit key, Adi Shamir spent his spare time Worked for a year with a distributed network of Sun workstations.One can indeed use a very long password - so long that no supercomputer will be able to crack it in the foreseeable future.But such a long key is very inconvenient to use in daily life.Today, the NSA's purpose-built supercomputer that takes up an entire building could take a day to crack a 140-digit code.God, that's a whole day for this behemoth, just for such a broken code!

Cypherpunks intend to achieve the ability to compete with centralized computer resources through the "fax machine effect".If only you have a fax machine, it's crap.However, every more fax machine in the world, the more valuable the fax machine in everyone's hands.This is the logic of the network, also known as the "law of increasing returns".This law is diametrically opposed to those traditional economic theories based on equilibrium transactions.According to those theories, you can't create something out of nothing.But actually, you can do it. (Until recently, only a few leading economics professors were doing the work of theorizing this concept.) And hackers, cypherpunks, and many high-tech entrepreneurs already know this.In the network economy, more leads to more.This is why giving is so often an effective tool, and why these cypherpunks are willing to give away the tools they develop for free.This behavior, which has nothing to do with kindness, actually comes from a clear intuition that the network economy rewards those who are "more" over those who are "less"-you can spread these tools for free. Start by sowing the seeds for this "more". (These cypherpunks also want to apply this kind of Internet economics to the opposite of encryption, which is password cracking. They can build a supercomputer for the masses, which is to connect millions of Apple computers together, each running A small part of a very large distributed decryption program. In theory, such decentralized parallel computers, the sum of which will be the most powerful computer we can imagine - far more than national security The centralized computer of the bureau should be powerful.)

This idea of ​​ants eating elephants captured the imagination of these crypto-rebels, and one of them came up with a free software implementation of a highly recognized public-key encryption scheme.The name of this software is PGP, which is the acronym for Pretty Good Privacy (pretty good privacy).This software has been freely circulated on the Internet and is also available on disk.In some places on the Internet, it is commonplace to see messages encrypted with PGP, often accompanied by a statement that the sender's public key is "available on request". PGP isn't the only free encryption software out there.On the Internet, cypherpunks can also use RIPEM, an application designed to enhance the privacy of emails.Both this software and PGP are developed based on RSA, which is a set of encryption algorithms and has been patented.However, RIPEM is the software released by RSA itself, while PGP was invented by a password rebel named Philip Zimmerman himself.Because PGP uses RSA's proprietary mathematical knowledge, it is actually illegal software.

RSA was developed at MIT.Federal funds were used in part, but later licensed to the academic researchers who invented the software.These researchers published their encryption methods before filing for patents because they feared that the NSA would lock up the patents and even prevent civilian use of the algorithm.In the United States, inventors have one year after they disclose an invention to apply for a patent.But in other countries or regions, patent applications must be made before publication.Therefore, RSA can only obtain patent rights in the United States.In other words, PGP's use of RSA's patented math is legal overseas.However, PGP is usually spread in places like the Internet where no one owns the territory. (Which country's judicial power can be generally effective on the Internet?) In this space, intellectual property is still a bit murky, and it is close to a certain An initial state of cryptographic anarchy. The way PGP handles this thorny legal issue is to inform US users that they are responsible for obtaining a license from RSA to use PGP's underlying algorithms. (Of course, it's the right thing to do.)

Zimmerman claims that he released the quasi-legal PGP software worldwide because he feared governments would take back all public-key cryptography, including RSA's.And RSA can't prevent the current version of PGP from being circulated, because the Internet is like this: once something is uploaded, it can never be taken back.It's hard to say how much RSA has lost.Whether it's the illegal PGP or the officially licensed RIPEM, the Internet has a facsimile effect. PGP encourages users to use encryption — the more people use it, the better it is for everyone involved. PGP is free, and like most free software, users will sooner or later become willing to pay users.Until now, only RSA offered permission.Economically speaking, for a patent owner, this is a wonderful scenario: you don’t have to do anything (because piracy and dissemination are done by others) and millions of people use your patent, Discuss and learn the secrets and benefits of your product, then wait until they want to use the best product and come to line up to buy your stuff.

The fax machine effect, the upgrade rules for free software, and the power of distributed intelligence are all part of the emerging network economy.And politics in the online economy certainly needs the kind of tools that the cypherpunks are juggling.Glenn Turney, president of the annual hacker conference, used computer networks to campaign last year when he ran for office in California, giving him a solid understanding of how such tools affect politics.He noted that e-democracy requires digital tools that can build trust.Here's what he wrote online: "Imagine what would happen if a senator responded to an e-mail, and someone altered the letter and sent it directly to the New York Times? Authentication, digital signatures, etc. It’s essential to protect all parties.” Encryption and digital signatures are just one technology that extends the dynamics of trust into new domains.According to Philip Zimmerman, encryption technology fosters "webs of trust," and such networks are at the heart of any social or human network.The cypherpunks' obsession with encryption technology can be summed up as: pretty good privacy means pretty good society.

Fueled by cryptography and digital technology, network economics has transformed what we might call "pretty good privacy."The web has moved privacy from the realm of ethics to the realm of the marketplace—privacy has become a commodity. A telephone directory is valuable because it makes it easier to find a particular phone number.When the telephone first appeared, having a telephone number listed in a directory was valuable to compilers and to all telephone users.But today, in a world where phone numbers are readily available, a number that isn't listed in the directory is more valuable to users (who pay more) and phone companies (who get more money) who don't want to be listed. valuable.Privacy is now a priced commodity.

Most privacy transactions will soon take place in markets rather than government offices.Because in a distributed, loosely organized network, the centralized government fails and no longer guarantees that things are connected or isolated.Hundreds of privacy vendors will sell privacy at market rates.When you sell your name, hire "little brother" to get the most money from spam or direct marketers for you, and help you monitor how this information is used on the Internet.And "Little Brothers" will negotiate on your behalf with other privacy vendors for employment services, such as personal encryption devices, numbers that are never published, blacklist filters (block messages from unfriendly people), stranger ID screening machines (such as caller ID, which allows you to only answer certain numbers), and hiring mechanical agents (called cyberknowledge bots) to track down various addresses, while also employing "anti-cyberknowledge bots" to erase traces of your own online activities .

Privacy is information that is polar opposite to ordinary information, and I think of it as "anti-information".If a little bit of information is removed from the system, it can be seen as the system reproducing the corresponding anti-information.In a world where the waters of information are endlessly replicating to the point of exploding the Internet, the disappearance or evaporation of a little bit of information becomes very valuable—even more valuable if it can be lost forever.In a world where everything is interconnected, connections, information, and knowledge are cheap, and isolation, counter-information, and zero-knowledge are valuable.When bandwidth is free and gigabytes of information are being exchanged anytime, anywhere, not wanting to communicate has become the most difficult annoyance.Encryption systems and their ilk are isolated technologies.They somehow inhibit the inherent tendency of the Internet to connect and send information indiscriminately.