From: anonymous@extropia.wimsey.com
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 94 20:20:22 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Program to circumvent the Sep 1 Legal Kludge part 1/5
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9408252349.F9501-0100000@fido.wps.com>
Message-ID: <199409030237.AA18100@xtropia>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Tom Jennings <tomj@wps.com> Writes:

>
>Can you please stop mailing me these unidentifyable, undecodable
>files from a person I cannot identify, nor detect the reason for
>the anonymity?

Ok, I won't send that file anymore.

Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com> writes:

>
>I've been receiving these, too.  It seems to be a program which has the
>same effect as a one-line shell script to add the "+legal_kludge" option
>to the command line for PGP2.6, so that it generates backwards-compatible
>messages without violating anyone's license agreements.  

Well not exactly, because of a bug in pgp, the +legal_kludge=off
does not work by itself. What does work is
+CERT_DEPTH=0 +LEGAL_KLUDGE=OFF +CERT_DEPTH=4
Where 4 is the value that you actually want for CERT_DEPTH.
I did not want my program to change the behavior of pgp with
respect to CERT_DEPTH. So I had my program scan config.txt to
find the value there. It then sets the final value of CERT_DEPTH
to be the value found there. If no value can be found for CERT_DEPTH
then it uses pgp's hardcoded default which is 4.
>                                                         It's easy to
>do such a shell script in Unix.  
Which shell language? I understand that unix has several although I am
not a UNIX expert.
>                                 Is there a good way in DOS to add a few
>command-line arguments in front of the ones the user has supplied?
I wanted to have a program that could be drop in replaceable in
a dos environment. I wanted it to be possible to have existing pgp
shells continue to work with the SEPT 1 kludge disabled.
In DOS, there are common library  calls that only spawn
executables (.exe files) and do not spawn .bat files. The same is
true of OS/2. If any of the commonly avaiable pgp shells used these
calls, I wanted my program to be an executable so that it would
work as a replacement which would disabled the kludge.
I do not see how one could write a dos .bat file that could
scan config.txt for the users choice of CERT_DEPTH. If you could
do it, it would be sure to be slow. Some Dos users do not use
microsoft's command.com, so it is hard to see how a .bat file
could be fully portable in DOS.
>                                                                    If
>so that would seem easier (and smaller) to distribute.
>
>Hal
>
>


In short, I think my program could be useful to some people
who must send messages to people with old versions of pgp.
I wish that someone would make it available at an ftp site.

I won't send it out anymore and I am sorry I bothered you.

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