A book by Peter Wayner (pcw@access.digex.com), of interest to cypherpunks. (OK, cypherpunks mailing list subscribers then)

There is more info at Peter's home page: http://www.access.digex.net/~pcw/pcwpage.html but I couldn't get to it when I tried just now.

Yes, my service provider, DIGEX, is really terrible about providing access to my net page. I'm sorry about this, but if you need more information, feel free to write me.

I got my copy from Border's in Houston on Sunday.

He describes mimic functions, a particular interest of mine. He also covers basic encryption, error correction, secret sharing, compression, context free grammers, anonymous remailers, reversible computing, etc.

There is an evaluation of several stego packages, and an inclusive (there isn't enough published about steganography to call it extensive) bibliography.

The presentation is at an introductory, but not trivial level. I wish there had been more technical explanations, but I suppose the author would have lost a sizable fraction of an already tiny audience.

Yes, this was one dilemma I faced with writing the text and I decided that a "Scientific American" level text would be more likely to appeal to more people. In fact, my hope is that many people will be interested in a presentation of this level because of the political implications. If you can't find the information, you can't censor it. I think, though, that there will be plenty of meat on the bones of this book for many people. Anyone who reads cypherpunks carefully and works through the mathematical details won't find much new here, but I don't know if there is much else out there. The proceedings from the information hiding workshop in Cambridge will generate some more papers, but that's in the future.

By the way, "the people who participate on the cypherpunks mailing list" get a nice "thankyou" in the preface.

Of course this should be repeated and amplified. Many people post great stuff to the cypherpunks list. I couldn't have done it without you. My only regret is that the best people on the list might not learn much new from the book. Sigh.

Rick F. Hoselton (who doesn't claim to present opinions for others)