Re: Articles on RC5 and GOST in January 95 Dr Dobbs Journal

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Ian Farquhar wrote:

> Many of you will remember the heady days of the early 1980's, when it was
> customary for PC magazines to include substantial amounts of code in their
> pages (often 25% or so of the magazine).  This all had to be typed in by
...
> Around the mid 1980's a rather interesting device appeared.  It was essentially
> an automated scanner for high-density barcodes.  You photocopied the magazine
> page containing these 25 cm (or whatever) barcode strips, which you fed into
> the reader.  It scanned the contents of the barcode, and voila, a working
> program.  At least in theory.  The downfall of this system is that the reader
> cost several hundred dollars, and almost nobody could afford them.  It never
> quite caught on.

"Cauzin Softstrips" was the product, as I recall. I wouldn't use the
word "quite" in "It never quite caught on," except in irony, as I'm
pretty sure essentially _no_ such machines were sold. Maybe a few, but
not many more. 

> Even so, I really wonder if the export of cryptography ON PAPER but in a
> machine-readable form would be in violation of ITAR?  If anyone has one of
> these old scanner, it might very well be worth trying.

We had this discusssion a while back, when Phil Karn was trying for an
export license for Bruce's software. 

OCR recognition rates are already close to 100% for monospaced fonts
like Courier (at least many of us see this...I have TypeReader and it
does very well with such fonts), and could be made even higher.

In my view, the whole export issue is a joke anyway. Anyone with
access to Bruce's code could quite easily remail it, with or without
first hiding the exact form by compressing, encrypting, or stegging
it.

That this hasn't happened--so far as we (or I) know--says more about
other things than about the laws supposedly barring such export.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be an interesting test case, though. Hard
to imagine it happening. I expect the test case could come just as
easily be printing up the code in Courier, or OCR2, and prominently
putting "Insert this end into OCR machine" or somesuch....and then
calling attention to this as one crosses the borders. (I'd guess the
outgoing Customs inspection would be nonexistent, as usual, and that
such an attempt to trigger a test case would be fruitless.)

--Tim May


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