Ask Cryptome's John Young Whatever You'd Like

John Young of Cryptome, though trained as an architect, has garnered recognition in another field entirely. Since 1996, he's been publishing timely, trenchant news online as the mind behind crypto jya.com and Cryptome. ("Our goal is to be the most disreputable publisher on the Net, just after the world's governments and other highly reputable bullshitters." ) This has put him on the forefront of various online liberty issues, from the MPAA's DeCSS crackdown on DeCSS (he fought the lawyers -- and won), to Carnivore, to Dmitry Sklyarov's continuing imprisonment, and now the several fronts along which electronic communications are threatened by current and upcoming legislation. He recently posted this to the front page: "Cryptome and a host of other crypto resources are likely to be shutdown if the war panic continues. What methods could be used to assure continued access to crypto for homeland and self-defense by citizens of all nations against communication transgressors?" Now's your chance to ask him about the fight for online freedom. Please pose just one question per post; we'll send 10-15 of the highest moderated ones on to John for his answers.

Comments

MD5 Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear John,
My question has to do with both privacy and encryption. Recently, some web sites have taken to hiding the IP addresses of their visitors using MD5 before storing these IP addresses in a database. This feature exists in order to keep the IP addresses of visitors secure from data mining. Do you believe that using the MD5 signature of an IP address rather than the actual IP address provides real privacy to users? Would an attack to MD5 all known IP addresses be trivial, or extremely difficult?

Thanks for your time.