new source of PGP sourcecode

[Michael Hortmann]

Michael Hortmann
Dept. of Mathematics
University of Bremen
michaelh at informatik.uni-Bremen.de

PGP public key by finger
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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.

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