Hi, is anyone working on a ssh package for Debian?
For those who don't know what is ssh: it is a less insecure replacement for telnet/rlogin/rsh/rcp, with strong authentication and encryption. It is available from ftp://ftp.cs.hut.fi/pub/ssh/. The license says it may not be sold commercially without permission, but including it on CD-ROMs with other free software is explicitly permitted. It would be real nice to have it standard, along with a ssh-aware rdist. There is still a problem with silly US crypto export restrictions and patents (RSA) - but it should be OK outside the US... (IDEA is patented too, but triple-DES can be used instead if necessary.) Are there any plans to create International version of the distribution containing such munitions (though I don't see how you can kill someone using ssh :-), which is not affected by these problems? It might be a good idea to move it outside the US anyway, because of the Communication Decency Act - will all packages be scanned for four-letter words? :-) It also solves problems with software patents like LZW: BSD compression for PPP (part of the standard kernel!), GIF, compress, etc. I think it won't make much difference to the package maintainers if it's 100ms away... What do people think? Marek
