Re: word 97 decryption finally completed

Shaw Terwilliger (sterwill@postman.sourcegear.com)
Mon, 13 Sep 1999 11:40:07 -0500


Caolan McNamara wrote:
> development version 0.5.29 and above of wv at
> http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/publink/mswordview/development
> (or in abiword cvs) has this ability built in for conversion of
> word docs to other formats.

I'm not sure I can be happy about this yet... not that the work isn't
good or the feature needed, but I don't want to be deemed a criminal
arms dealer by my government. :)

AbiWord's CVS server is located in a country that prohibits its
citizens from exporting strong cryptography. The definition of
"strong" seems to change every day, and I'm neither a crypto expert
nor a lawyer, so I'm really not sure how or if decryption of a
stream qualifies as an armament.

Caolan, do you have any pointers to further information on the
encryption scheme Word is using? I think we have a copy of the
United States export regulations around the office and I'd
like to do a quick check.

-- 
Shaw Terwilliger


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