things on my mind well i am relatively new to the cypherpunks list so i have a few comments to make on my behalf. (1) i read in a message about the current rise in the member of subscribers and this rise was passively related to Mondo. There was also some concern expressed in this message about the number of people dropping the list and from those comments i reply that the list does generate an awful lot of mail. And this mail is often quite technical (well if i was talking from a technically illiterate point of view it would very technical... i generally can follow the idea and their technicality though) and this technicality is a turn off to the Mondo type. I know that Mondo has said allot about the problems of personal security on the information age but not in tech-speek... i believe that most of the Mondo types will unsubscribe from this list because it is not a part of their focal of interest. Yes the list talks about current issues but again from a technical point of view and for the Mondo crowed n general it is a real turn off. (2) Att Mail is nice. If anyone cares i will find out about what features it has... i.e. ftp, telnet, irc, etc... My sister is an Att employee and she is given an attmail.com address for her on the go and work sight mail... it is nice because i can stay in contact with her because Att mail has a 800 international dialup. My sister has a portable NCR computer with modem and can get my mail where ever she is. In 1992 she was back and forth from Puerto Rico and New Jersey for AT&T now she is all over Europe. A very nice convenience for the (wo)man on the run. (3) Am I from D.C. and i am unsure if the world knows about this but in November the Secret Service raided our 26oo meeting at the Pentagon City mall. I know that we here in D.C. have all the more concern about security and frequently use are PGP keys because there is little doubt that our BBS are being taped et cetera and i am certain that in the near future there will be an upsurge of us D.C. boyz to your list. (4) About DES. The data encryption standard is, no doubt in my mind, quite cracked by NSA. If it is not completely cracked it is at least very easy to get into by these boys. I have found that there is too much evidence that NSA has gotten in to DES pretty well. For starters (not a proof by the way) the cryptographers who work for NSA spend most of their time breaking encryption and its pretty mind boggling to think that no short cuts have been found to DES by a bunch of dedicated cyptographers. Damn if that was my job and my field of knowledge i am sure i would have at least a little short cut of some sort. So i have been doing a little work on DES but i am unsure about the validity of my ideas and their effects on encryption... if i do feel that i find something i will certainly let it out but i was just wondering if people had any DES source in all or any languages??? it would be very helpful to get cross language DES source... Well i hope that this note wasn't too boring but i felt that i had to get it out to the list. so hopefully i will get some