Hmm... Well, having a program that will auto install segments only if they are signed by trusted public keys is a good one... but then again, most of the non-techies just want to have a program that works and that they're happy with. Many people would rather just keep a stable, working, but older version instead of going to the trouble of trying to always have the latest. But perhaps we could have a system such that only authenticated program upgrades could be installed, to combat against trojan horses, virii, bombs, etc. I would be wary of an auto-update system because of possible bugs in the software. Even if you only allowed updates from completely trusted public keys, even the best of us make mistakes and screw something up... but public-key protection against viruses and trojan horses would be a good thing. Perhaps we just need something that would make using encryption easier. Tell me what you all think of this as a project for cypherpunks: Does anyone want to develop an encrypted term program? On-the-fly encryption over a modem. This would allow everyone to encrypt very easily. It could support plug-in modules (with signatures) to support automatic pgp signing/verification, additional cipher modules (ie DES, IDEA, MPJ2). When logging on to you favorite BBS, instead of typing your password in, you enter your account, and then set your encryption on your terminal to your password, and if it's right, then you can decode the transmission and you are logged on. That way nobody could steal your password (or anything else) by tapping your transmission. Encrypting two way modem transmissions would be a problem, but it could probably be solved by packaging the data into manageable packets with an error-correction protocol and then encrypting those. Error-correction would be vital, as line noise can wreak havok on encrypted data. (Although you could reduce the impact of the errors by weakening the cipher somewhat.) I do have several ideas as to how to do this... What do you think? Anyone want to take this on as a project? If I'm going to do it, it would be for MS-DOS systems, tho if there's enuff interest, it might be possible to develop multi-platform support concurrently. Let me know...