USENET newsreaders and cryptography: features/suggestions/questions
Clifford A Adams
caadams at polaris.unm.edu
Wed Jul 7 21:59:59 PDT 1993
Hello out there!
The current version of strn (see below) contains a signature
verification command (control-V). It looks for either a RIPEM or PGP
signature line and passes the article to the appropriate command for
verification. (Strn leaves it up to the user to interpret the output
of the command.)
I have a few questions/requests that I hope the cypherpunks
list can help me with:
1. Does anyone know if including code like
system("pgp -m foobar") might cause legal problems? Strn doesn't
implement any cryptographic techniques.
2. What's the status on a USA-legal PGP (using RSAREF)?
I would like to greatly expand strn's cryptographic features, but I'd
rather not implement features that many of strn's users can't use.
(That includes me--I won't use PGP until/unless the legal issues are
cleared up.)
3. It would be greatly convenient if someone would implement
a "verify signature only" switch for PGP. Most of the applications I
would like to use don't involve data hiding--just signature verification.
I'm also lobbying the RIPEM author to include a similar feature.
Also, if anyone has any comments or suggestions about
newsreader cryptographic features feel free to send mail. I hope to
do some work later with things like remote reconfiguration, trusted
ratings, suggested reading lists, and the like.
--Cliff
P.S. Strn is about 10K lines of C code added to trn. It is
(probably) just a few weeks away from a public beta test. If anyone
really wants to test strn, let me know and I'll consider it. More
information is also available via finger or mail.
--
Clifford A. Adams caadams at polaris.unm.edu | USENET Interface Project:
457 Ash St. NE Albuquerque, NM 87106 | Tools for advanced newsreading
STRN (Scan TRN) now in testing: trn 3.0 plus flexible newsgroup menus, fast
article scoring with score ordered display, and merged/virtual newsgroups.
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