July 2018

A recent Internet-Draft catches my eye: Social Media (An Apology), ostensibly authored by “The Elders of the Internet” (or “Edlers”, as Appendix A has it).

As a result, we were caught unawares when the Internet became the sink for every poorly-considered argument, paranoid thought when you wake up in the dead of night, and shrieking nutjob you’d usually cross the street to avoid.

It’s really hard to argue with all this, particularly section 2.4.

It has been more than a decade since I wrote Responsible Behaviour, in which I mused about how many Wikipedia articles the man on the Clapham omnibus would need to read to understand a particular cryptography-related joke. I saw this, in part, as a proxy for whether cryptography was becoming mainstream. I ended with:

Do you agree? More interestingly, what do you think the answer will be in ten years?