alt Hacker NewsI guess tech has grown too large and fractured and maybe most working software engineers are too young to be familiar with phk and his points of view.
He's been a strong privacy and FOSS advocate for decades and has more credibility on both of these topics than nearly anyone on this board.
He also has an account and comments frequently. phkamp. I suggest reading some of his comments before making judgment.
So many kneejerk and nuance-less opinions. Absolutely hilarious that people are thinking the guy who wrote MD5crypt and BSD Jails is anti-privacy.
Also eye opening watching how many people are getting frothing-at-the-mouth mad seeing somebody with that pedigree coming to different conclusions than they do.
Replies
I’m mostly seeing people disagree with the substance of his argument, though. Your argument through authority is weak.
Sadly, after the 2024 anti-E2E-messaging piece[1] I do in fact think he’s pretty anti-privacy overall. Perhaps calling that pro-regulation is more correct, but my (non-American) experience over the last, say, twenty years does not include literally a single piece of regulation that traded privacy for more government control (however reasonable) and went well, so, same difference. Accomlished hacker holds some wrong-to-downright-harmful political opinions; wouldn’t be the first time.
[1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3703126