Re: ULotD? Cuban Tattoos.

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Subject: Re: ULotD? Cuban Tattoos.
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 13:41:24 -0500
From: glen mccready <glen@qnx.com>
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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>


The story posted is an urban legend.

It is NOT an urban legend that someone has been tattooed with "RSA in
Perl". A picture of Richard White's tattoo is at:

http:/www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/tattoo.html

It is also not entirely an urban legend that this has been joked about
-- a friend of mine (a Greek computer security expert who's name I
won't mention) was forced to spend a couple of years back in Greece
after completing his PhD because of restrictions on his original visa,
and his friends joked heavily about giving him a crypto tatoo to
render him non-exportable. However, it was only a joke (albeit one
that was told regularly in computer security circles because the
person in question is fairly well known among security weenies.)

However, the stated story is completely bogus.

Perry

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At 05:14 PM 1/27/98 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:

>From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
>
>
>The story posted is an urban legend.
>
>It is NOT an urban legend that someone has been tattooed with "RSA in
>Perl". A picture of Richard White's tattoo is at:
>
>http:/www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/tattoo.html

It is also true that he had a typo in the tattoo.  It seems someone, who
will remain unnamed, joked about "what if it has a typo, is it still a
violation of ITAR?".  Seems they decided to proof read it.  "Doh!"
 
---
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Alan Olsen <alan@clueserver.org> writes:
> At 05:14 PM 1/27/98 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:
> 
> >From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
> >
> >
> >The story posted is an urban legend.
> >
> >It is NOT an urban legend that someone has been tattooed with "RSA in
> >Perl". A picture of Richard White's tattoo is at:
> >
> >http:/www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/tattoo.html
> 
> It is also true that he had a typo in the tattoo.  It seems someone, who
> will remain unnamed, joked about "what if it has a typo, is it still a
> violation of ITAR?".  Seems they decided to proof read it.  "Doh!"

There was a typo in the tattoo, fortunately it was correctable, they
missed out a backtick (`).  You can see this on the tattoo gif
referenced above:

it says ...$_=echo "16... and it should say ...$_=`echo "16...

I pointed this out to Richard White when he sent me the gif of his
tattoo, and he had his wife put in the backtick, as there is a
reasonable amount of space between the = and e of echo.

If anyone wants to repeat the exercise, the perl/dc program is smaller
now:

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

Adam