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gerdesjtoday at 12:49 AM2 repliesview on HN

I remember deploying SSL on NetWare in the late 1990s and being given ... something that the US allowed to be exported as a munition!

I don't recall the exact details but it was basically buggered - short key length. Long enough to challenge a 80386 Beowulf cluster but no match for whatever was humming away in a very well funded machine room.

You could still play with all the other exciting dials and knobs, SANs and so on but in the end it was pretty worthless.


Replies

tiagodtoday at 1:00 AM

A few years ago a client of mine gave me a big-ish APC UPS. I recently got new batteries for it after the outage here in Portugal, and to turn on SSH I had to agree that I was not a terrorist organisation's nor in a country where encryption can not be exported to.

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kragentoday at 2:03 AM

Right, 40-bit export-grade SSL.