CipherSaber
This is a DIY crypto effort intended to help thwart Big Brother (or Big Mother) government, and other forms of organized crime. The CipherSaber Home Page tells what it's all about.
In response to a correspondant of mine whose mail I managed to lose inbetween inconsistent e-mail filtering passes, I've added a sort-of replacement for the the useful General Frenetics page that I once linked to and has now vanished into Google's cache.
PGP-compatible software - CTClib, CTCjava.
CTClib, and the applications built upon it are a PGP 2.6 and 5 compatible encryption system, offering not only compatibility with PGP, but a selection of alternative recognised strong encryption algorithms (128-bit Blowfish, Square, s3'DES, Biham's key-dependent DES, TEA & 3Way for conventional encryption, in ECB,CBC, OFB as well as the standard CFB mode, Elliptic curve on GF(2^255) for public key), in additon to those supported by PGP5 (triple DES, CAST5, SHA1, and Diffie-Hellman).
N.B.Square and GF(2^255) have both been shown to have vulnerabilities and are deprecated).
The IDEA algorithm is out of patent now. Now that PGP5 uses other algorithms, it is high time to drop all use of IDEA. As soon as I have written full OpenPGP compatibility, I certainly intend to.
Other licensing and related issues are discussed at the main CTC site.
Campaigning bit
I started using PGP with version 2.6ui, which is a code stream derived by dubious means from PGP 2.3, and was offered under the GPL; I dallied briefly with 2.6i, which is a program that was released under the far more restrictive MIT licence, and was in technical breach of that, by offering 2.3 backward compatibility (version byte 2), so went back to the purer original. I suspect that there are others out there who still hew to the original code, and are thus trapped with IDEA as their conventional algorithm.
CTClib offers you a mechanism to migrate to a platform which eschews the commercialisation ("selling out") of the original, and achieves the worthy goal of enabling you to drop patented software (one of the significant abominations of the late 20th century).