ULASAN 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTngMxmymX4
DEFCON: Crypto for Hackers
Eijah (demonsaw)
55m51s
This talk was given in front of DEFCON audience in the yearly conference in Las Vegas. The speaker of the talk is known as @demon_saw on twitter.

The Snowden revelations shocked the world. Most have known that intelligence government agencies have the capability to spy and gather information from the internet, but the scale and the sophistication of the data gathering done by the NSA and other agencies around the world makes the whole community think again about the way they are being tracked by the government. Not only the agency, the leaks also implicates the private corporations which cooperates with these agencies, eroding trust in a centralised system needed in the current systems of communications. The consequence of this, a world without secrets, is a scary world in which every little thing you say or do can be tracked be held against you, whether in court or by blackmail. In this increasingly hostile environment to be the aggressor, there is only one way to keep secrets and keep our freedom. Encryption enables people to talk over publicly watched channels while keeping the communications secure and undetected. While the techniques and tools for encryption (such as ciphers and softwares) have been available for a long time, its use only increased recently and only prominent in certain circles such as activists, whistleblowers, and journalists working with sensitive topics. More people need to use encryption to maintain their freedom over what they talk in private with others.

Most people are intimidated when they see the terms when they try to use encryption, such as PGP, AES, MD5 and such. It does not help too that most guides to using encryption still mostly use tools that have to be used through command line interface instead of a user-friendly GUI that can be used by anyone. Another hurdle to using encryption is the need to keep context of the variables you use when you are using them. For example, when using PGP encryption, you need to keep track of your keys and other people’s key. You need to remember where you put your own private and public keys and where you have stored other people’s public key to communicate with them. Not everybody have the time or the resources to keep up on that. Coming off of these difficulties, demon_saw has created a tool that does not rely on a central authority (that needs to check a user’s id and password) to communicate with each other, which also is very simple to use called demonsaw.

I think this talk is very important to watch, as the more recent leaks shows how prevalent is this surveillance over the internet is. Having crypto means having freedom, the freedom of not having to think about the consequence of every single thing that we talk over the internet. And the development of tools enabling the wider use of encryption is always welcome. The current trend really shows that we as a community needs to be self sufficient and not rely on centralised systems for our private and/or sensitive communications.

rraihansaputra
http://os162-rrrsss.blogspot.com/2016/12/ulasan-1.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTngMxmymX4 55m51s
2016-12-10