Michael Hortmann Dept. of Mathematics University of Bremen michaelh@informatik.uni-Bremen.de PGP public key by finger ____________ Reconstructing PGP 2.6.1 Sourcecode by Scanning and OCR'ing the MIT-Press Book It has always been somewhat awkward to produce legal versions of PGP outside the US, requiring a lot of extra work. Recently, MIT-Press published the book Philip Zimmermann PGP Source Code and Internals which can be purchased in any bookstore. In the foreword it is mentioned that this book may not be exportable, because it has not been granted a "Commodities Jurisdiction" (CJ) by the US State Department. However, the international book distributors don't seem to take notice of that. Presently, I'm trying to find out what the legal status of the book may be in Germany, if it would be legitimate to request me to destroy it, or if on the contrary I can legally extract its contents and publish the result on the Internet. In the meantime I have asked some of my students to scan the book. This has already been accomplished, resulting in about 150MB image files. Right now the OCR process is on its way; by looking at samples we are optimistic that most mistakes will be found and corrected by a semiautomatic editing process; what mistakes remain should be detected by the compiler. As we will keep the image files, the original OCR files, the awk-scripts and intermediate files of the editing process, there can be no doubt that the final sourcecode has resulted from the book, and not from an illegal ftp. Each file will be marked as of this origin. When I'm convinced of the legality of this course of action, I will give notice on the Net and deposit the final product and the intermediate files under appropriate names in ftp://ftp.uni-Bremen.de/pub/security/crypt/ For the Net-community it may be interesting to know now that such a project is on its way. _______