There was an article in Z Magazine about the RC4 disclosure, and IP and information in general on the internet, in which the cypherpunks were mentioned. They got a lot of information confused about cypherpunks, but over all it was an interesting article. Here's the first portion of the article, in which cypherpunks were given prominence. If anyone wants to write them and clear up their confusion between anonymous remailers and mailing lists, or other errors about the 'punks (which generally cast us in a worse light then we should be), their address is: Z Magazine 18 Millfield St Woods Hole, MA 02543 ******** Pandora's Mailbox; RC4 a secret no longer by Mark Chen On September 9 there appeared on the Cypherpunk's Internet mailing list a short piece of computer code purporting to be RSA Data Security's secret RC4 cipher algorithm. RC4 is one of the most widely used commercial ciphers, but its internals have for years been a guarded trade secret--a status that changes within hours, as the program fragment, which simple tests revealed to be the genuine article, traversed the the farthest corners of the Net via e-mail, bulletin boards, and file transfer. State Department export regulations, as well as intellectual property laws, were smoothly rendered moot. As Cypherpunks founder Tim May says, "National Borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway." Soon after RC4 hit the Net, RSA Data Security (RSADSI) issued a statement that read in part: "It has come to RSA Data Security's attention that certain RSA trade secrets, in the form of confidential and propietary source code, have been misappropriated and disclosed..." "...Not only is this act a violation of law, but it's publication is a gross abuse of the Internet. RSA has begun an investigation and will proceed with legal action against anyone found to have violated its intellectual property rights." Setting aside the questionable legal basis of these threats, why doesn't RSADSI bring charges against the person who originally released the code? The answer is that they don't know who did it. The code was distributed through a mechanism called a "mailing list," a system that distributes e-mail to people who have signed up to receive messages on a given topic. For example, if you were interested in fish, you might sign up for an aquarium hobbyists' list. People could then send email to the list server, and the e-mail would be forwarded to everyone on the list. RC4 was posted to the Cyperpunks "anonymous remailers" list. When an anonymous remailer receives a message, it strips off all of the sender information and remails the message under an anonymous pseudonym. Thsi effectively breaks the link between sender and recipients, and makes tracing impossible. The intended purpose of these remailers is to allow free distribution of various intellectual "commodities" whose distribution is ordinarily discouraged by law or custom. A Cypherpunk faction called the Information Liberation Front has long used anonymous remailing to distribute inaccessible, expensive, copyrighted literature. Moreover, the remailers serve as technological guarantee of the right to free speech. They allow unpopular opinions to be voiced, while protecting the authors of those opinions from retribution. Far from being a "gross abuse of the Internet," as RSADSI maintains, the distribution of RC4 was a case of the Internet doing what it does best--propogating ideas. While this act may or may not have been a violation of human-made laws, it was a faithful exercise of the natural laws of information flow... [etc etc]