PGP code book, distributed to route around export restrictions, on eBay

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an email encryption system originally released at a time the U.S. government wanted to treat all such encryption as military technology. To route around an absurd prohibition on exporting such software, its creator, Phil Zimmerman, published the entire source code as a dead-tree book and exported that instead. A copy of that book (alas, not a moldy tome filled with blackletter illuminations) is now on eBay.

Auction [eBay via Wired: Threat Level]

[#1 posted by Matthew Walton , June 19, 2008 6:15 AM]

Sorry to be a grammar pedant, but you should have written "its creator". "it's" is never the possessive form of "it", it always means a contraction for something like "it is". "its" is rather like "his" or "hers" in that it's actually a completely different word, not a possessive formed by apostrophe-s like you can do on a noun.

I also think this book is rather good, because it really is a silly law. I'm pretty sure that not long after the mathematics behind key pair encryption was discovered, the countries that the US wanted to avoid exporting to the technology to already knew about it. They have people with brains too.

[#2 posted by Antinous , June 19, 2008 2:02 PM]

Matthew,

Each of the BB editors has an awe-inspiring command of language. They're also really, really busy and put entries up quickly.

[#3 posted by Joel Johnson , June 19, 2008 2:20 PM]

No worries, Matthew. Thanks for the typo spotting!