Re: 5722-AC3

On 17/02/2009, at 8:02 AM, Bill wrote:

I'm going to talk to the Business Partner once I get back in the office
to see if they can supply it, but I gotta ask: why is it so hard to get
this feature? It's required for quite a number of areas on the iSeries,
yet they are make it so difficult to find.

The answer to that question was provided by IBM Support: "They said that it isn't included with the CD's because of security concerns"

Suitably vague response but if you want to know the real reason then you should take it up with the US Government (your Government?) because it is them that considers cryptographic products to be "munitions" and therefore subject to a bunch of additional constraints as to which organisation or country can get which level of encryption. That's why IBM (used to?) supplies 3 levels of encryption.

o AC1 (40-bit) was for France because they like to spy on their citizens
o AC2 (56-bit) was for countries friendly to the US
o AC3 (128-bit) was for US organisations and financial institutions in countries friendly to the US

I think now they just supply AC3 to all countries friendly to the US because the US Government have relaxed the rules--partly because so much e-commerce depends on a reasonable level of encryption but probably because the NSA have no trouble cracking 128-bit encryption (conspiracy theorists sign up here).

However, because encryption products are munitions they are subject to extra rules covering distribution and this is the cause of your difficulty in obtaining a copy.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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