--- title: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's... description: A personal essay drawing parallels between the 1990s cryptography export control battles and today's AI model access restrictions. The author recounts... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/twenty-five-years-ago-it-was-cryptography-today-it-s-model-weights-oimubeyfm twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights | daily.dev og:description: A personal essay drawing parallels between the 1990s cryptography export control battles and today's AI model access restrictions. The author recounts... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/twenty-five-years-ago-it-was-cryptography-today-it-s-model-weights-oimubeyfm og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/oiMubEYfm.png og:image:alt: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A personal essay drawing parallels between the 1990s cryptography export control battles and today's AI model access restrictions. The author recounts purchasing an OpenBSD 3.0 CD in Sri Lanka as a symbol of the fight for strong cryptography, noting how OpenBSD deliberately structured itself outside US export jurisdiction with the motto 'because we can.' The piece argues that AI export controls follow the same flawed logic: they bind law-abiding users and defenders while determined actors remain unaffected. It points to open-weight models like Mistral and DeepSeek as the modern equivalent of Blowfish on a t-shirt — once published, no export letter can recall them. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 201 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-04). **TL;DR:** The HN thread is a wide-ranging, loosely connected debate spanning DRM/piracy effectiveness, the quality gap between pirated and legal streaming content, AI model export controls analogized to crypto export controls, and various tangents about homelab setups and geopolitics. Sentiment is mixed-to-critical, with no clear consensus. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 50% mixed · 30% skeptical **The case for** - Streaming services like Netflix succeeded by making legal access easier than piracy for mainstream users, showing that convenience beats DRM. - Modern self-hosted 'arr-stack' setups can automate piracy to the point of being simpler and higher-quality than any commercial streaming service. - Pirated releases often offer superior quality (Blu-Ray remuxes, multiple subtitle tracks, DRM-free files) compared to compressed streaming offerings. - Some commenters note they pay for content and only pirate for quality reasons, suggesting willingness to pay exists when value is delivered. **The pushback** - The claim that piracy is universally easier than streaming is disputed — for non-technical users, streaming services remain far simpler. - Piracy still requires nonzero technical competency, storage, and setup that most average users won't bother with. - Moral and legal arguments against piracy are raised: not liking a price or service doesn't justify taking content without paying. - The AI model export-control analogy to crypto is challenged: frontier LLMs are far more complex, costly, and rapidly evolving than a printable algorithm. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): A sprawling, multi-threaded debate with strong voices on both sides of piracy ethics/practicality and AI export controls, with no dominant consensus. **Hottest debate:** Whether modern piracy is genuinely easier and higher-quality than legal streaming, or whether that claim is 'mental gymnastics' by people who simply don't want to pay. **Open questions** - Would removing DRM from streaming content actually reduce piracy, or is the catalog fragmentation the real driver? - Can AI model export controls be effective given how easily model weights can be shared, unlike physical goods? - At what price point or service quality would most pirates return to legal channels? **Highlights** > Piracy is a service problem. Copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their obnoxious greed. Things were easy enough when Netflix had a complete catalog, now every studio wants to roll their own shitty streaming services in order to cut Netflix out. Result is a fragmented mess where you want to watch a great film but you have no idea where the hell it even is, and even if you find it you discover it doesn't work because your computer isn't locked down to their tastes, and even if you buy a TV appliance they stream you some shitty horribly compressied "high definition" video with artifacts in pure black frames, all on their homegrown laggy borderline unusable video players with zero features. Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. It's the sort of thing that makes me feel like a total moron for giving money to these corporations. > — [matheusmoreira on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129606) > > mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it Heh, that’s what you think modern piracy is? How quaint. In reality I have my own “Netflix”, with access to effectively all media ever created and I click play. That’s it. That’s the entire process. No credit cards, no finding which service has it, no finding out that the service doesn’t have it in my country at this time, no ads. I punch in what I want to watch, I click play, and it plays. > Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card. Sounds like your problem. Though again, that’s already more steps than it is for me. > which is that some people don’t want to pay for things I was happy to pay, and did so for years. Then the services got worse, increasingly fragmented and ever increased in price as service got poorer. Now I’m no longer happy to pay; and have a superior service to boot. The industry successfully convinced me to give piracy up, before driving me back to it a decade later. > — [theshackleford on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130527) > > Piracy is a service problem > Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. I think the only people who believe that pirating is easier than using the streaming services are people who spend so much time with computers that they round the mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it. I am technically capable of doing all of those things. I also have a rotation of online streaming services. Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card. I think this is all just mental gymnastics to try to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that some people don’t want to pay for things and, of those, some get a little fun out of doing all the steps and setup to pirate things. > — [Aurornis on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130038) > > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work. If "navigating torrent sites" is your idea of piracy, then you should certainly check out the so-called arr-stack of software that searches online sources for wishlisted items, downloads them, equips with metadata and subtitles, and presents it for viewing or listening WITHOUT ANY USER INPUT. Apple TV and other commercial offerings are a steaming pile of shit in comparison and I can't imagine people like the CEO of Apple watching stuff off Apple TV and not a proper arr-stack setup. It's like eating McDonald's every for every meal when a chef is readily available. With Apple TV, you can't even do something as mundane was fixing translation errors in subtitles before you show a movie to a friend. You're stuck with what some cheap outsourced translation service came up with. > — [mopsi on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131950) > RSA algorithm you can print on a shirt - and that would give you encryption that works as well as it possibly can. There's no "RSA 6.7 Turbo Pro EncryptingPlus" that would give you something radically new that the "t-shirt RSA" can't. LLMs are massive, complex, and a moving target. Making them is hard, and there's no "we're done" there - the frontier updates every few months. It's easy to get and run a 2B model locally, but what concerns people isn't a cheap end device 2B - it's the 10T RLVR-fried monsters that frontier labs play with nowadays. > — [ACCount37 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129416) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083599) · 163 points · 201 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Schneier on Security](https://daily.dev/posts/schneier-on-security-bf9hdzrjt) · Schneier on Security · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#cryptography](https://daily.dev/tags/cryptography), [#ai-regulation](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-regulation), [#openbsd](https://daily.dev/tags/openbsd) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/twenty-five-years-ago-it-was-cryptography-today-it-s-model-weights-oimubeyfm) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/twenty-five-years-ago-it-was-cryptography-today-it-s-model-weights-oimubeyfm","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/twenty-five-years-ago-it-was-cryptography-today-it-s-model-weights-oimubeyfm"},"datePublished":"2026-07-31T22:12:30.800Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T12:27:29.031Z","description":"A personal essay drawing parallels between the 1990s cryptography export control battles and today's AI model access restrictions. 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