THE CYPHERPUNK ENQUIRER "Encyphering minds want to know." Dr. Dimitri Vulis came out of the closet today on nationwide television. On Geraldo Rivera's special show "Why Geeks Aren't Getting Any" Dr. Vulis, widely known as an ASCII artist, admitted to having crushes on noted cypherpunks John Gilmore and Tim May. "I've tried subtle hints, blatant suggestions, everything," the noted cryptographer and sexual advice column author whined, "but they both keep ignoring me. Maybe I should just admit that they're probably both straight and get on with my life." When contacted at Toad Hall, John Gilmore expressed surprise that Dr. Vulis was seeking a sexual relationship with him, but noted in passing that he had not seen any of Vulis' recent posts since Dr. Vulis' name is now included in the default killfiles for the latest versions of Eudora, procmail and mixmaster. Representatives of the Enquirer attempted to contact Tim May for comment, but were driven away by a barrage of small arms fire. The Cypherpunk Academy of Codes and Cyphers today announced the winner of the annual Perry Award, given to the cypherpunk who has contributed the most over the past year to increasing the S/N ratio on the list. The winner this year is John Gilmore, for shutting down toad.com. "Admittedly, this is a stretch for us," stated the committed chair- person, "since it involved some philosophical and mathematical problems with dividing 0 by infinity, but at least it's not as bad as the cryptography list. Nobody here can figure out what to do with a S/N of 0/0." Jim Bell, a strong runner up, was also in the running, but, as one spokesperson said, "we felt that most of his contribution came from his inability to spell the word 'unsubscribe'." In related news, the "Vaporware of the Month" award goes to the International DES challenge attack, for still not having even beta versions of their software available, even though at least three competing projects have been operational for several weeks. When contacted by the Enquirer Piete Brooks, leader of the committee, admitted that a lot of the problem was due to arguments over how to divide the money resulting from their present and potentially far more lucrative but still unsuccessful attack, an attempt to brute force the Black Unicorn's ATM PIN number at the Bank of Liechtenstein. The Chaos Computer Club of Hamburg, Germany, was awarded $10,000 yesterday by RSA, Inc. for being the first to crack the RC5-128 challenge. "It was a fairly simple hack," stated an anonymous spokesperson for the notorious hackers group, "we simple coded up an ActiveX application that, when downloaded, immediately started using all the spare CPU cycles for the brute force attack. Then we put inserted it into a "Minihan Sucks!" web page, and waited for the NSA to show up." Next: from FC97 - what did Hettinga REALLY do with all those bananas? Encyphering minds want to know!