Tim May says that the criticism I received was mild. It was not that mild. I am particularly incensed by Poskanzer's suggestion that I fetch the old information when, it turns out, that info was not available. That was bullshit! Anyway, hopefully, Poskanzer's technical skills are great & he will pull a giant rabbit out of the hat. In our defense, I would guess that Sergey had the same idea that I had: "Steganography! a hide in plain sight, travel casually in day- light, leave no footprints, safe long term storage, last-ditch, safe crypt. & , apparently, no one's working on IBM micro implementations! What an opportunity to make a contribution! If we don't write the code I'll bet we can provoke a really good programmer with crypt knowledge to do it." It would be difficult for us to know that this area was already discussed, tactics pretty much resolved, & had big old guns working on it without them telling us. Thank God the big old guns were there to disabuse us of our pipe dreams & illusions! I'm pretty irreverent, but I do have a lot of respect for the really smart guys who are sacrificing huge chunks of time in writing code & theory to free us as well as themselves. It takes me many hours per week to deal with cypherpunks mailing list. So, I can understand how the big old guns can get bothered by newbies farming old ground & taking up lots of bandwidth while mudding the water. With that said, & having a lot less to say that I thought I had, I shall go back to a higher LURK/BANDWIDTH ratio & stop annoying people. As Johnathan Winter's mother used to say: "If you can't be bright, be polite." also quiet? Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers