[Cryptography] On 40-bit encryption

[Jerry Leichter]

On Aug 20, 2014, at 5:25 PM, Alfie John <alfiej at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>> One of the reasons for relaxing the export regs was that they were 
>> hurting US businesses.
>> The regs made creating crypto products much more complex as you needed 
>> to have different versions for different export regimes.
> 
> Which was mostly security theatre anyway e.g. IIRC the link to download
> the different versions of Netscape (i.e. strong vs weak crypto builds)
> were right next to each other on the download page. In other words you
> had to trust that someone living in Iran or North Korea agreed with US
> export law and was going to only ever click on the weaker download link.
Oh, but you could check.  Someone form Iran or North Korea trying to download the strong build would be required to set the Evil bit on all their packets.

                                                        -- Jerry :-)