At 10:45 PM 3/10/96 -0500, you wrote:
IS there anyone outside of governments, doing code-breaking _for a living_?
Don't know if it's a full-time income or not, but there are certainly several people offering commercial products for cracking Microsoft and other popular word processor encryption for people who've lost their passwords. And people who are designing good cryptosystems to protect information have to understand how to crack them, so they can tell whether their new system is stronger or weaker. But there's usually not much other legitimate need for cracking real messages; the authorized people usually have the keys. Whether there are also Bad Guys doing the job for profit, I don't know. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissable." - US government statement on China...