FFS, I'm crying now
Sorry, I didn’t intend to reopen the wound of a grief that others endured almost three years ago. Of course, that’s unavoidable if I speak of my belated discovery. My condolences.
As I indicated, I wasn’t so close to Leo. Most of our interactions were when we were both relatively new to the forum. But we were on cordial terms, and there was something I always thought perhaps I really should seek to discuss with him someday—something that only one person on this forum ever knew.
There is no “someday”. I hope that you were wiser than I was with my “maybe someday”. It’s a truism, and true, that any of us could drop dead at any moment—but it’s a shock when it happens, and all the more when someone who seems so strong turns out to have such a hidden pain.
As for myself... Now, I’m pondering cosmic ironies, behind on about five or six different threads, not getting anything done, and totally not in the mood for the thing that’s a DT drama. Later, later.
Michael Cassio (AKA Nullius)
Lol, are we supposed to believe you're actually doxxing yourself, or are you just reserving the Othellian name for your next alt?
As quoted in OP, it is what Leo named me in February–March 2018. He did so in jest, but I think it’s elegant.
I never forgot what he said. I’ve considered before that I may take it as a “realistic” pseudonym. It has the security advantage that someone else picked it for me, with no prompting from me whatsoever. “Michael Cassio” was totally Leo’s idea, as you can see by clicking back from the quote to those old threads. Not my idea. Thus, it cannot leak any information about me.
Anyway, do we get to read the message or is this another crypto puzzle?
Neither. Not everything is some grand scheme with layers of hidden motives.
It’s part of the message I most wished I could send Leo at the moment when I wrote it—something I wish I’d told him years ago, when I could have,
when I wanted to. It’s that “maybe someday” thing.
It is for Leo only. It is private. I would entrust it to him—and I do think he’d want to see it as much as I want him to.
It’s encrypted
-R (not
-r) to a PGP key I have for Leo,
-R to my PGP key, and to a very strong random password. (>256 bits of
entropy, which I actually know something about.) I feared that maybe Leo discarded the PGP key he’d given me for a brief discussion, so I made an alternative way for him to decrypt my message. No, that doesn’t make any rational sense. I was emotional, okay?
I will reveal one sentence, which explains why I said it’s
part of what I wanted to say:
I’d say more here, but this message is not post-quantum encrypted.
I’ve been intending to upgrade my nullius PGP keys to post-quantum. But it makes no difference here, for I have no post-quantum key for Leo. GnuPG’s first release with post-quantum encryption was in September 2024, by which time it seems Leo was most probably dead.
I need to assume that NSA’s dragnet, and perhaps unpredictable others will decrypt that message within my lifetime, and maybe within the next 5–10 years. Thus, in an emotional moment, I had a little fantasy that I’m telling Leo just enough that he will take it seriously, contact me, prove his identity with a digital signature, and provide me a post-quantum key for the rest.
No, it doesn’t make sense.
Neither does the fact that if I’d spoken to him when I could have, it most likely wouldn’t have been post-quantum encrypted, anyway.
