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Comment by Haemm0r | Hacker News Reader

Assembly instructions: "And now never ever connect pin x and pin y, because then you'd have a working modem, which would be illigal...

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An old Heathkit radio set had a red wire that you put a tag on that said something like "Do not remove this wire, or this radio set could broadcast on HAM radio frequencies which would be illegal unless properly licensed!"

Or cryptography. It used to be illegal as well, right?

It was illegal to export certain classes of cryptography software. It was however never illegal to export books about that software. So what they did was publish a hardback book about the algorithm [1], which contained the entire source code of the software. This book was then freely sold all around the world. Now all you had to do was scan and OCR the relevant pages, cat together the resulting files and compile. All perfectly legal.

I remember there being distributed proof-reading groups on Usenet and IRC where you would get 1 page of OCR'd text and the corresponding scanned image and you would manually go through and verify and correct the source code.

[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/PGP_Source_Code_and_Int...

The export certainly was - but the 1A provided a loophole - they printed the code for PGP into book form, sent THAT overseas then scanned and OCRd it.

I have a tattoo of an encryption routine, partly as a protest. Unfortunately I changed it at the last minute to make it look cooler and introduced a bug.

Here's the entire proper Perl 5 code:

    undef $/;print<>$<>

The buggy version is slightly shorter but I depended on an incorrect reading of some tricky wording in the docs and didn't test thoroughly enough. I'm considering turning the tattoo into a diff.

I recommend Crypto by Steven Levy as a high-level refresher on the events of the time. (https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9780670859504&st=xl&...)

I'd be afraid that a bug in Perl-- revealed years later-- might render my arm open to compromises. Some new fuzzing method comes around and all of a sudden my arm is unencrypted for all the world to access.

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