> governments who murder and torture their citizens.
What about governments that murder and torture citizens of other countries? The number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians killed by the US is pretty high - this fact alone is enough to make the US one of the worst human rights offenders in the world.
Ham radio is a special case, and it is actually the Hams trying to block crypto. There is actually an FCC open rule making issue right now on the issue, and arrl is against it.
The solution is to develop protocols which use crypto but use a public key for now.
I didn't know that! I used to be a member of FidoNet (pre-internet network that provided e-mail and usenet-like services) back in 1990s and any commercial activity and encryption was similarly prohibited - relay operators were even supposed to read their users' mail and delete any messages that violated the rules.
I don't think there's any chance of this coming to the internet though. There are just too much uses for encryption besides conspiring for terrorist attacks.
MD5 is so fast on GPUs, you can do some pretty ridiculous dictionary attacks in a matter of minutes (like trying every combination of words that has ever been written in a book or posted online - using google's n-gram corpus for example). Then you have plenty of time to try letter substitutions (3 for e), combinations such as word + number + word, etc.
This doesn't apply of course, if your password is a long string of random characters.
Now see, that's why everybody should use Tor now and then! :) That way this unique characteristic will become common enough for a generic filter on Tor users to become ineffective (by their measures). If you don't want to be seen connecting to Tor directory authorities and to relays directly, use a Tor bridge. Better yet, run one yourself! If you are using obfuscated bridges, you can (as of now) fool even pretty sophisticated DPI boxes which won't be able to fingerprint your traffic. (cf. continued Tor developers' battles with China's intense DPI infrastructure)
Can I suggest next time you have a perfectly normal and mundane need to access any government website - you fire up TOR Browser first? Go look up your local representative's name, or the garbage collection days for your suburb, but do it over TOR, and leave the trails in their logfiles.
I had a similar thought recently. People who are currently in their 20s and 30s had a unique privilege of growing up when fully-featured computers appeared in almost every household. A bored 13 year old kid getting a Pentium-166 desktop for Christmas is much more likely to start tinkering with the system, learn to program, hack, etc. than if his or her first computer was a walled garden iPad.
Now with the huge success of smartphones and tablets, it may well happen that most households of 2025 won't even have a computer suitable for anything but media consumption and "apps".
By the way, bitcoin can no longer be efficiently mined on GPUs since the network hashrate has been increasing tremendously with ASICs (tenfold growth in the past 6 months and continuing steadily)
What about governments that murder and torture citizens of other countries? The number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians killed by the US is pretty high - this fact alone is enough to make the US one of the worst human rights offenders in the world.