** Reply to note from stewarts@ix.netcom.com 06/07/96 11:15am pdt

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4. The ability to crack DES-1 in near real-time mode is present. (See above). First, this has been loosely confirmed for ages. Someone was mentioning that FBI offices supposedly have software that (on a 486) can crack a DES-1 key in under an hour. Multiply * modern high capacity computers = problem. However, this does not nessesarily follow from

Sigh. This is of course hopelessly bogus. You can't even crack RC4/40 in under an hour on a 486 machine, thoguh you can do it very fast on custom hardware.

I figured it had been sensationalized. I received an email from someone who had actually played with such a beast (or claimed to have) and I believe he mentioned it had an addin card.

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This Message Was Sent With An UNREGISTERED Version Of PMMail. Please Encourage Its Author To Register Their Copy Of PMMail. For More Information About PMMail And SouthSide Software's Other Products, Contact http://www.southsoft.com.

I won't encourage you to register it, but at least please find a way to quiet the sucker down. Mailers that do one line of advertising on unregistered shareware are semi-tolerable. Mailers that do 4 lines are highly rude. Fortunately, a good binary editor makes it easy to go in and turn the message to something quieter, like -'s or :-)'s...

I just did that. Took awhile to find a decent OS/2 email program... I'm not sure the new one is better, but it sure is less intrusive. That and a little bug that resulted in some messages getting dumped here (still wondering how it managed that) cost them a sale.