Trenton’s law - UEFR (Useless Elitist Forum Responses)
You may be familiar with Godwin’s law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1 (100%)”.
Occasionally I participate in forums where people wanting to learn and having questions are sometimes met with a truly disgusting von oben attitude, which not only is rude, but also quite often containing completely useless — and sometimes confusing — information. Information that doesn’t help the person wanting to learn, rather the opposite.
I have seen — and been there myself — people joining Linux or cryptation forums, having honest questions and being met with this kind of answers. No wonder if a regular user rather just quietly leave, making the community poorer for it.
As a first draft, I defined what I — in utter humbleness — now call “Trenton’s law”. If this law already exists, feel free to point it out to me.
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a statment that all previous suggestions from other participants are invalid since they are not theoretically perfect, without the provision of a reasonably useful alternative, approaches 1.”
E.g. “You are so naïve if you think GPG/TrueCrypt/AES256/etc will keep your data safe. The only close to secure, real encryption is using One Time Pads with high entropy, generated by quantum computers and isotopes. You’re stupid if you use X.”
So by this line of reasoning, you are being told that you shouldn’t bother with encryption at all, unless you have a supercomputer and a couple of radioctive substances at home, I guess.
Sure, if the MI5, CIA, NSA, PSB or whatever may come grabbing your disks, putting your RAM in special freeze containers and process them all through their secret supercomputers, cracking what you thought was encrypted files wide open (or maybe not), maybe the encryption wasn’t perfect. But meanwhile, for us ordinary people, having some protection for our personal data against more mundane baddies or nosy people is a sensible idea, even if it is not perfect.
