this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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I was busy sucking on my thumb then, for real they did that?
Yeah, I went on holidays to the US and got the 128 bit plugin for what was probably Netscape (the precursor to Firefox) and it was very clear during the download process that it wasn't to be taken outside the US. It was considered a weapon if memory serves me.
Anyway not long after the rest of the world caught up and it looked silly in hindsight so here we are.
Edit: just to add some context on the "weapon" thing.... The other standard was either 56 or 64 bit and it was secure enough at the time given compute capabilities but it was also clear that it would be crackable in time whereas 128 bit has a very long shelf life even with modern capabilities, as long as the algorithm was good (and it was / is)
"Cracking DES", about 56 bit encryption you are talking about, was released in 1998, and showed how to construct an fpga machine to decrypt DES in just hours (their proto did it in a week), and also showed that DES was weakened on purpose to allow the US to decrypt foreign comms.
Wow. I never heard about that one. I do recall some distributed community attempt at breaking (I think) 64 bit DES around that time. It used spare CPU cycles and I had it running on my Pentium 2 machine.
Was DES still widely used at that point do you recall? I had AES in my head for SSL and the like.
DES was in wide use until AES because of standards. The RSA libs commonly accepted in the finance industry still used DES in the three round form until AES replaced it (so 2001 is when the replacement started, I imagine some banking systems and government systems still used it post 911 and well into the 2020's).
MIT press put out the book, so it is probably still available. Using HTTPS for everything was a huge step up in security for everyone, not least because OS updates address vulnerabilities. The RSA labs libraries were statically linked back in the 90's, IIRC (at the very least a blob you shipped with your app.)
Oh sweet summer child
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption
Even the first cell networks were sabotaged to make eavesdropping a simple thing.
Death to america.
Dear lord, they are stupid
Where does it mention what the person was talking about