Some more crypto-related news from Germany: In Germany, online banking is a very popular application of the phone company's online service T-Online. Now Bank 24, a subsidary of Deutsche Bank, is beginning to offer online banking on the Internet (http://www.bank24.de). They use SSL to transfer Java applets that securely encrypts the financial data. Export SSL is secure enough to guarantee that the applets are authentic. So much about exporting crypto hooks... As journalist Detlev Borchers reports, the German tax consultants' association Datev (http://www.datev.de) distributes a software toolkit that allows their clients to transfer confidential data to the consultants via AOL. CompuServe or T-Online. The toolkit uses PGP to encrypt the data. At a press conference, the Datev spokesman was very surprised to learn about political problems with encryption software -- because as he said, the German tax authorities also use PGP (however, in a variant where the patented IDEA algorithm has been replaced). Last, but not least: Addison Wesley Germany has now published a German edition of Applied Cryptography. The book does contain source code. I wonder how they got the "munitions" from the US to the German printer?