Yeah, the Internet is awfully big these days. (I started reading Usenet in the early 1980s when there was less than 1/2 MB per day of news and you could really read it all at 1200 baud :-) It's busier now...) For cryptography, the interesting places I know of are: - Usenet newsgroups: sci.crypt is the main technical crypto newsgroup talk.politics.crypto is the main random-discussion newsgroup alt.privacy.clipper is intended for Clipper discussions alt.privacy is a general-purpose priovacy newsgroup (there are others.) alt.security.pgp is for discussion of PGP and how to use it - cypherpunks mailing list (send mail to cypherpunks-request@toad.com to get help) is a fairly buysy (25-50 msgs/day) mailing list which deals with topics like writing crypto code, discussing protocols, using crypto to build privacy, political activism, etc. Signal/Noise ratio is usually pretty good. - ftp sites (file transfer protocol - log on as "anonymous", password=yourlogin, rsa.com - RSA's ftp site ftp.funet.fi - Finnish University Network ftp site, where most of the interesting code that's outside the US goes. garbo.uwasa.fi - Another good site in Finland; I think the name's right. ftp.csua.berkeley.edu (formerly soda.berkeley.edu) - home of the cypherpunks ftp archives ftp.eff.org - Electronic Frontier Foundation's ftp includes some crypto discussions There's also the World Wide Web, which I don't currently have software for, so I don't know if there are good Web sites yet (I've seen a lot of Web addresses go by, but most seem to really be ftp sites.) For finding code, "archie" is useful - telnet to ds.internic.net or archie.ans.net or archie.rutgers.edu , log in as archie, no password, and then type help to find out how to use it - it tells you where to find code for ftp. (Most archie sites actually tell you "There are too many users on right now, here's a list of other archie sites", and you randomly pick one in Korea or Israel or somewhere that's not too busy :-) Good luck! Bill # Bill Stewart AT&T Global Information Solutions, aka NCR Corp # 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 Phone 1-510-484-6204 fax-6399 # email bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart@attmail.com # ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465