[ale] Better do my talk before it is illegal

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Mon, 2012-01-30 at 12:16 -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> "Michael H. Warfield" <mhw at WittsEnd.com> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, 2012-01-29 at 17:36 -0500, Charles Shapiro wrote:
> >> Dang, I missed that fight.  I still have my computer case autographed
> >> by Phil Zimmermann though.  A friend of mine actually had the "This is
> >> a Munition", but wouldn't part with it for love nor money.
> >
> > Seriously...  Both of my sons and I have the "RSA munitions tee shirt",
> > a black tee shirt with the RSA algorithm printed on it (amusingly
> > printed in Great Briton and IMPORTED).  I'll bring mine next month.
> > One

> Is this the "RSA-in-4-lines-of-PERL" T-shirt?

That would be the one!

> > time, I asked a school councilor at their high school if they could wear
> > it, because of the "zero tolerance" weapons policy there, and the person
> > mentally locked up and could NOT get their head around the very concept
> > and ended up (after several sputtering staggering moments of confusion)
> > saying "I have no idea".  Schools and school personnel have no sense of
> > humor or irony and do not like their policies being made the horses' ass
> > of jokes.
> >
> > I've met Phil several times in the past.  He visited ISS several times
> > as well as a Networld Interop conference or two.  We chat when we have a
> > chance though it's been several years at this point.

> Yes, Phil is definitely an interesting guy.  I, too, haven't seen him in
> a bit (I think it's been a year or two).  I'm just glad that he no longer
> calls me at 2am asking me questions*.  :-/

> > Regards,
> > Mike

> -derek

> * 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.

> -- 
>        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
> _______________________________________________

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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