@soatok Belated thanks to you, and @matthew_d_green for your columns. Utterly terrifying despite the light tone. How to opt out?

I also appreciate the callback to #JamesMickens' ;login: column (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf), it really brightened my day.

When someone says "assume that a public key cryptosystem exists," this is roughly equivalent to saying "assume that you could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this 'Jurassic Park,' and that you could stroll throughout this park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle." With public key cryptography, there’s a horrible, fundamental challenge of finding somebody, anybody, to establish and maintain the infrastructure. For example, you could enlist a well-known technology company to do it, but this would offend the refined aesthetics of the vaguely Marxist but comfortably bourgeoisie hacker community who wants everything to be decentralized and who non-ironically believes that Tor is used for things besides drug deals and kidnapping plots. Alternatively, the public key infrastructure could use a decentralized "web-of-trust" model; in this architecture, individuals make their own keys and certify the keys of trusted associates, creating chains of attestation. "Chains of Attestation" is a great name for a heavy metal band, but it is less practical in the real, non-Ozzy-Ozbourne-based world, since I don’t just need a chain of attestation between me and some unknown, filthy stranger — I also need a chain of attestation for each link in that chain. This recursive attestation eventually leads to fractals and H.P. Lovecraft-style madness.

I'm a little surprised Mickens didn't dub his gnu-metal band "Chains of Attestation" instead of XXYM (https://tentimesyourmaster.com/).