Yeah, yeah, this has only the most extremely tenuous links to cryptology. I'll talk about some free code (GPLed) that I've written at the end of this message to make up for it. From: j.hastings6@genie.geis.com Date: Wed, 20 Jul 94 09:23:00 UTC - From an individual rights point of view, the assumed government "social contract" is bogus because it is not voluntary. With respect to many taxes, for example income tax in the US, it is voluntary. You avoid entering into the social contract very simply: don't interact with the society. Actually, you can even play a little without paying -- very legally -- by never choosing to extract from society a net income greater than the lowest income tax bracket. Some war tax avoiders have done this for decades. Some even make reasonable amounts of money and give most of it away. If you wish to avoid having the negative penalties of the social contract, you simply avoid accepting the positive benefits. If you don't require the society, don't participate in it -- at all. Any `income' that you acquire without interacting with society will not be taxed. This route is not for everyone. Most people prefer to enter into the contract. Yes, I'm being more than a bit facetious here, but not completely. I not only respect, but I agree with most of the complaints typically voiced by the `libertarian' segment here, but the extremes of the economic arguments are ridiculous. Some -- certainly not all or even most -- manage to come off sounding like spoiled teenagers: ``Everything that I have I have completely because of my own doing and the fact that there's this social structure all around me had nothing at all to do with it.'' There is a degree to which a social contract is not a completely unreasonable thing. Of course, most (all?) government's to date have gone about a zillion times overboard . . . . * * * * * Ok, now the cypher connection. I've been working on, and using, a package to add PGP support to Emacs-based messaging. I call it PGP Enhanced Messaging (PEM), a blatant rip-off of an already used acronym. It is initially targeted at doing sign (standard or as an X-PGP-Signed header), verify signature, encrypt, sign-and-encrypt, decrypt, extract key block, and insert key block. Lots more on the wish list :-) npgp.el defines region oriented PGP operations. The process interaction is different than other packages in that it runs PGP asynchronously and notices when PGP asks questions and passes them up to the user. pem.el defines message oriented operations. It knows about message headers and bodies, etc., but is not tied to any specific package. The user layer is a set of interfaces to other packages. Currently there's pem-mhe.el (works with mh-e.el, an interface to MH) and pem-gnus.el (works with GNUS). Since pem.el does most of the work, new interfaces should be relatively easy. A pem-vm and pem-rmail would be nice, but they're not my top priority. If you're interested in Alpha testing let me know. Basically, it works fine in my environments (Sparc-10, SunOS-4.1.3, lemacs-19.10 at work, fsf-19.24 at home), but the first Alpha tester has demonstrated lots of places where environment differences, different Emacs customizations, etc. cause problems. When it's a bit more stable, I'll ask for Beta testers, probably here and on a newsgroup or two. Rick