If you hit L1-A to get into the boot monitor and typed the phrase &quot;Love your country but never trust its government.&quot;, it would simply echo it back to you instead of printing an error.<p>There was definitely no DES software in the Sun boot ROMs, and the DES chips were optional and rarely used. If there was any DES software in the boot ROMs, it would have been illegal to ship Sun Workstations overseas, since DES software was officially considered an export controlled munition.<p>To address that problem, John funded and helped build Deep Crack [1], a hardware DES cracker, whose purpose was to prove that it was well within the capabilities of the NSA to crack DES (which they lied to deny), since EFF could do it for a few hundred thousands of dollars.<p>They published a book with the VHDL source code so you could build you own, which didn&#x27;t include a floppy disk because that would have been considered a munition, so they printed the checksummed source code in the book along with software to reliably bootstrap scanning it in and validating it. (Like a software error correcting paper floppy disk, to get around the stupid export control laws.)<p>&gt;In 1998, the EFF built Deep Crack for less than $250,000. In response to DES Challenge II-2, on July 15, 1998, Deep Crack decrypted a DES-encrypted message after only 56 hours of work, winning $10,000. This was the final blow to DES, against which there were already some published cryptanalytic attacks. The brute force attack showed that cracking DES was actually a very practical proposition. Most governments and large corporations could reasonably build a machine like Deep Crack.<p>&gt;Six months later, in response to RSA Security&#x27;s DES Challenge III, and in collaboration with distributed.net, the EFF used Deep Crack to decrypt another DES-encrypted message, winning another $10,000. This time, the operation took less than a day – 22 hours and 15 minutes. The decryption was completed on January 19, 1999. In October of that year, DES was reaffirmed as a federal standard, but this time the standard recommended Triple DES.<p>&gt;The small key-space of DES, and relatively high computational costs of Triple DES resulted in its replacement by AES as a Federal standard, effective May 26, 2002.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;EFF_DES_cracker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;EFF_DES_cracker</a><p><pre><code>    John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu    gnu@toad.com
    Love your country but never trust its government.
        -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania</code></pre>