Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.

Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.

Time to create some esp32-in-a-lightbulb open weight model dead drops.

Please don’t open-circuit the light for several hours.

Yeah this persuaded me more than I thought it would, but there are still some pretty big differences IMO. A frontier AI model is a lot harder and more costly to produce than an encryption algorithm. Especially if we believe Anthropic that the Chinese can only do it by distilling their models (though tbh I would err on the side of not believing that).

We need a cypherpunks movement for open weight models