Issue 079: Trust

April 7th, 2025

Welcome to the 79th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Trust. In this edition, we explore trust and its importance in human society and culture; in the Library section, we review "Geekonomics" by David Rice; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch a video on the Veritasium channel where Derek Muller hacks Linus Sebastian's phone.

Who Do You Trust?

by Adrian Kosmaczewski

Have you ever asked yourself why do we live in society, surrounded by others? Why have humans gathered in slowly-growing communities at the dawn of our civilization? It turns out that humans are terrible when it comes at surviving alone. We are not particularly strong or fast, which means that we can succumb at the attack of any predator. We cannot fly by flapping our arms, we cannot swim at great speed in the sea. Our bodies suffer plenty of ailments and are prone to quite a few lethal illnesses. To add insult to injury, we carry a big, complex, and fragile organ inside our skulls that requires quite a few calories a day to function properly. Even worse, said organ is supposedly at the origin of a psyche (a novel concept in nature, apparently) with an annoying tendency towards anger, fear, and depression.

Derek Muller & Linus Sebastian

by Adrian Kosmaczewski

Previous articles in this magazine have explored real-life examples highlighting the insecurity of our modern communications infrastructure. Regular readers might remember the anecdote of an impromptu hacking lesson in the Universidad de Buenos Aires in the year 2000, where our teacher literally intercepted a phone call made by one of the students. The same article goes on to describe how I was able to use a software tool called "CaptureNet" to sniff packets on port 1863 (used by MSN Messenger back in the day) and thus secretly read all the exchanges between my work colleagues in 2001.

David Rice

by Adrian Kosmaczewski

Our biggest problem is not the lack of books explaining in detail the fragility of our software-driven world; it is the fact that nobody reads them. Of course, every so often one of those titles rises to the top of The New York Times bestseller list, some celebrity adds it to their list of favorite books, the author takes a year promoting the book in a few talk shows here and there, and might even give some sold-out conference talks outside their home country. They might even make a living out of said book. But as soon as a new shiny gizmo appears on the horizon, all the concerns raised by their work fade into obscurity, the state of the world degrades a bit more, and we are back in the starting blocks scratching our armpits and screaming like monkeys.