Mr. May wrote an excellent piece regarding the lack of in-depth discussion of code...and, I believe he's put his finger on the problem when he mentions that the majority don't feel capable of adding to the post; indeed, I fear I may be guilty of hubris for commenting on the posting of someone who clearly knows far more than do I about crypto. Continuing the theme, I've just bought a copy of applied crypto...and even after Data Structures II and Assembly Language I, it's tough sledding. I still can't fix the PGP makefile to compile for the Sun4 machine at the university (although, thanks to this list, I was able to find an already compiled version). The problem, if I may say so, is that code at this level of complexity may be achievable for full-fledged cypherpunks...but it is not yet for those of us who remain mere "wanna-be's". This is, I suspect, why cryptography is not spreading as rapidly as we would prefer. Keep in mind that the better programs, while technically elegant, just aren't user friendly. As as example of what is being dealt with, I have a friend with a new 486DX 50Mhz machine with a 300 Meg drive...and he only uses it for one application. Word Perfect 5.0. I just installed Compuserve for him. And, this is a really intelligent person, he's just not computer oriented. He needs PGP, SecureDrive, and so forth, but he doesn't understand how to use them. How many others are out there, just like him? I suspect a bunch. To get crypto 'out there' it is going to have to be very, very easy to use...and with instructions equal to a single double spaced page (or less) ... all of this is just MHO. So, I probably won't be reasonably able to make intelligent comments on the in-depth posts for *_at-least_* a year; but, I DO know how to delete the more tedious posters! ;-) Since I do pick up a lot from the posts, I do hope Mr. May (and others) won't get TOO discouraged... Regards