There's a full page equivalent article on encyption in today's San Jose Mercury News (12E-11E). The article concentrates on public key cryptography, and mixes some good stuff with some silly mistakes. The first page has about 4/5th of the article devoted to a big diagram showing how someone using public key encryption to cover a whole message, and sent it over the internet to someone in Argentina. All this without a mention of using symmetric cyphers, and without even mentioning ITAR. Another 1/8th of this page is given over to a bunch of cypher text that supposedly encodes the address of "Mr Cosmic Kumquat, SSl Trusters etc.." This address looks kind of familiar... but they seem to imply that the cyphertext is the output of an RSA encrpytion, not RC4. They then go on to discuss factoring, and explain the difference between the strength of algorithms in theory, and how Netscape became vulnerable due to "beginners mistakes" in the implementation, and how security is best assured by open disclosure, not security through obscurity. Simon ---- (defun modexpt (x y n) "computes (x^y) mod n" (cond ((= y 0) 1) ((= y 1) (mod x n)) ((evenp y) (mod (expt (modexpt x (/ y 2) n) 2) n)) (t (mod (* x (modexpt x (1- y) n)) n))))