Beautiful Code [33]
static char table[256] = {0, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 3, ..., 8};
pop = table[x & 0xFF] + table[(x >> 8) & 0xFF] +
table[(x >> 16) & 0xFF] + table[x >> 24];
Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom > The Heart of the Start
11. Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom
Ashish Gulhati
I speak of none other than the computer that is to come after me. A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate—and yet I will design it for you. A computer which can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix.
Deep Thought, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
In mid-1999 i flew to costa rica to work with laissez faire city, a group that was working to create software systems to help usher in a new era of individual sovereignty.[*]
[*] See The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, James Dale Davidson and Sir William Rees Mogg, Free Press, 1999.
The group at LFC was working primarily to develop a suite of software designed to protect and enhance individual rights in the digital age, including easy-to-use secure email, online dispute mediation services, an online stock exchange, and a private asset trading and banking system. My interest in many of the same technologies had been piqued long ago by the cypherpunks list and Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography (Wiley), and I'd already been working on prototype implementations of some of these systems.
The most fundamental of these were systems to deliver strong and usable communications privacy to just about everybody.
When I stepped into LFC's sprawling "interim consulate" outside San José, Costa Rica, they had a working prototype of a secure webmail system they called MailVault. It ran on Mac OS 9, used FileMaker as its database, and was written in Frontier. Not at all the mix of technologies you'd want to run a mission-critical communications service on, but that's what the programmers had produced.
It was no surprise the system crashed early and often, and was extremely fragile. It could hardly support two concurrent users. LFC was facing a credibility crisis with its investors, as their software releases had been delayed many times, and their first beta of MailVault, the flagship product, was no gem. So in the free time left over from my contract network and system administration work at LFC, I started writing a new secure mail system from scratch.
This system is now named Cryptonite and has been in constant off-and-on development and testing since then, in between other projects.
The first functioning prototype of Cryptonite was licensed to LFC as MailVault beta 2, and was open for testing in September 1999. It was the first OpenPGP-compatible webmail system available for public use and was almost immediately put to the test by LFC's investors and beta testers. Since that time, Cryptonite has evolved in many ways through interaction with users, the open source community, and the market. While not an open source product itself, it has led to the development of numerous components I decided to release as open source along the way.
11.1. The Heart of the Start
Developing Cryptonite and marketing and supporting associated services single-handedly for many years (with unwavering support and many invaluable ideas from my wife, Barkha) has been an incredibly interesting and rewarding journey, not only from a development perspective but also from an entrepreneurial one.
Before jumping into the nitty-gritty of the system, I thought I'd touch upon some points that have impressed themselves strongly in my consciousness over the course of this project:
My friend Rishab Ghosh once quipped that there's a lot of hype about how the Internet can enable wired hackers to work from anywhere, but most of the people who create this hype live within a small area in California. The great thing about an independent startup project is that it really can be done anywhere, and dropped and