[ale] Better do my talk before it is illegal

[Derek Atkins]

"Michael H. Warfield" <mhw at WittsEnd.com> writes:

>> * when I was back in school and acting as the release engineer for MIT
>>   PGP (PGP-2.6.x) he would often call at 2am asking about upcoming
>>   releases or about making changes.
>
> My DF1DD471 legacy key was created under 2.6.3, iirc.  Somewhere, deep
> in the bowls of that code, there is some trivial code for doing some
> routine task and Phil had commented it as "this was plagiarized from <so
> and so> who plagiarized it from <another so and so> who plagiarized it
> from <different so and so>.  So, it's been plagiarized 3 times now so
> that makes it public domain, right?"  I wonder if that code is still in
> the code base with the comment still attached to it.  I don't even
> remember what it was but I remember becoming aware of it reading over
> the code associated with the XOR bug back in those days where some code
> that was suppose to be "foo ^= mask" was "foo = mask" totally screwing
> up some generator function.  That might have even been earlier than 2.6.
> A lllooonnnggg time ago, that's for sure.

Yeah, that was the RNG function in 2.0 which was fixed somewhere around
2.1 or 2.2 -- I don't recall exactly.  It affected key generation.
Honestly,I should probably generate a new key and stop using my 703-bit
key I generated in 1992.  ;)

And yes, everything has since been re-written.  What became PGP-3, 5,
and the basis for PGP products in the mid-90s (to today!) was a complete
rewrite of every line of code.  We started with an empty directory and
built a new system from scratch using what we learned from the PGP-2
days.  Ah, those were the days!  Surprisingly some of that code I wrote
in 1996 is *still* in PGP's products today!

> Regards,
> Mike

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available