Re: Crypto CD

[JR@ns.cnb.uam.es]

At 01:52 AM 3/24/96 -0500, Ben Holiday wrote:

>I would plan to put unix/dos/mac all on one CD. I'm thinking that 
>realistically I can expect 50 megs or so. Possibly as much as 100 if I 
>find a TON of wonderful text. 

	I burned one such CD this last fall. Oh, well, it wasn't for
publishing, although I thought of that at the time. It was mainly to
be able to move with me all my data when I switched positions.

	I included all the Cypherpunks archives, and several international
FTP crypto sites in full (ya know, the italian, australian, english, pgp,
etc... places). It was well over your "50 megs". And I would find that 
pretty more useful (if I hadn't it already). :-)

	Oh, I'm lying. I also did a "purged" version to remove duplicated
packages first, when I didn't know if I would have enough sapce in the
few CDs I had to burn in the few days I had left. I seem to remember that
wasn't as big and maybe in the range that you mentioned. But it was 
compressed, and hence its usefulnes now is somewhat less since I have to
expand everything if I want to get it. I was filling the CDs with other
"important to me" stuff, and wanted to save space, but having the space
available I don't see any reason not to expand the material.

	What I'd suggest is a compilation of all main archives, purged
from duplications, rearranged rationally (I have it just in the original
hierarchies) and all expanded for direct access.

	If you add to that executables for most packages compiled for a
few popular platforms (Mac, PC, Linux and FreeBSD come to mind), I'd bet
that you'd get a far greater amount of space.

	But that's a lot of additional work though. I know from experience.
It might do for a very nice cypherpunk project. Although, there still
remains the "trustfulness" of the product: how can the final user know
that the sources, executables, key databases, etc... have not been
tampered with? From the original archives one has the truth one poses 
on them, but from a copy, one needs to trust the copier. And if it became
a multi-person project, all the people involved...

	But it's well worth a thought o two. If it helps you, my CDs are
probing now invaluable to me.

				jr