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A British spy agency is looking for recruits in a group suspicious of government: hackers.

A team of linguists applied statistics-based techniques to translate one of the most stubborn of codes, a German mix of letters and symbols.

A computer scientist discovered that a form of cryptography, believed to have been invented in the 20th century, actually has older roots.

A sculpture at the C.I.A.s headquarters has a secret code in it, and the artist is now offering a bit of help.

A claimed proof for one of the most vexing mathematical problems, P versus NP, set off shock waves online, demonstrating the potential of Web-based collaboration.

Such technical jousting matches are at the heart of the fields of computer security and cryptography.

One of the worlds most prominent cryptographers warned about a hypothetical scenario that could place the security of the global electronic commerce system at risk.

An anonymous computer programmer claims to have hacked the copy protection used in both the HD-DVD and Blu-ray high-definition DVD formats.

The United States Army has for the last month been training detectives of the bomb squad in cryptography to facilitate their work in tracking down the writers of kidnap and threatening letters, it was disclosed yesterday at police headquarters.

A Silicon Valley start-up company on Tuesday plans to unveil a new approach to sending secure electronic messages and protecting data, a simpler alternative to current encryption systems, which use long digital numbers, called public keys. The new company, Voltage Security, which is based here, instead uses another unique identifier as the public key: the message recipient's e-mail address.

LEAD: MOST people even vaguely familiar with computers are aware of two varieties of disks, hard and floppy, on which programs and data are stored. But the lesser-known cartridge disk has lately been gaining popularity with computer users.

Government attempts to control the export of data-scrambling software are an unconstitutional restriction on free speech, a Federal judge said in a ruling made public today. The ruling by Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of Federal District Court in San Francisco is a setback for the Clinton Administration, which has tried to orchestrate a compromise with technology companies that oppose its efforts to control such exports. The Administration seeks to require American companies that develop data-encryption systems to give Government agencies the ability to eavesdrop on data and voice communications.

A serious security flaw has been discovered in Netscape, the most popular software used for computer transactions over the Internet's World Wide Web, threatening to cast a chill over the emerging market for electronic commerce. The flaw, which could enable a knowledgeable criminal to use a computer to break Netscape's security coding system in less than a minute, means that no one using the software can be certain of protecting credit card information, bank account numbers or other types of information that Netscape is supposed to keep private during on-line transactions.

Last month the United States and 32 other countries agreed to create new international controls on the export of data-scrambling hardware and software. Many nations fear that the most advanced scrambling, which makes it impossible for anyone without the key to decode the data, could thwart efforts by intelligence agencies to track terrorists. Though the issue is a product of the information age, battles over secret coding have far older precedents. Below are excerpts from ''The Victorian Internet'' (Walker & Company, 1998), by Tom Standage, in which he writes about what he calls the ''19th-century precursor'' to the Internet: the electric telegraph invented by Samuel Morse and Charles Wheatstone. Cryptography -- tinkering with codes and ciphers -- was a common hobby among Victorian gentlemen. Wheatstone and his friend Charles Babbage, who is best known for his failed attempts to build a mechanical computer, were both keen crackers of codes and ciphers -- Victorian hackers, in effect. ''Deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating of arts,'' Babbage wrote in his autobiography, ''and I fear I have wasted upon it more time than it deserves.''

Two of Israel's leading computer scientists say they have found a way to more easily decode and then counterfeit the electronic cash ''smart cards'' that are now widely used in Europe and are being tested in the United States. The researchers have begun circulating the draft of a paper that points out higher security risks than those discovered last month by scientists at Bell Communications Research.

To try to slow the acceptance of the Linux operating system by governments abroad, Microsoft is announcing today that it will allow most governments to study the programming code of its Windows systems. Under the program, governments will also be allowed to plug their security features instead of Microsoft's technology into Windows. More than two dozen countries, including China and Germany, are encouraging agencies to use ''open source'' software -- developed by programmers who distribute the code without charge and donate their labor to debug and modify the software cooperatively. The best-known of the open source projects is GNU Linux, an operating system that Microsoft regards as the leading competitive threat to Windows.

In an important milestone toward making powerful computers that exploit the mind-bending possibilities of calculating with individual atoms, scientists at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, Calif., are announcing today that they have performed the most complex such calculation yet: factoring the number 15. The answer itself was no surprise: 3 and 5, the numbers that divide into 15, leaving no remainder. But the exercise that led to that simple result -- the first factoring of a number with an exotic device called a quantum computer -- holds the promise of one day solving problems now considered impossible, and cracking seemingly impenetrable codes.

The technology that will cashier the linguists, mathematicians and hackers who have traditionally devoted themselves to breaking codes comes with a cool name: quantum cryptography. Ordinary cryptographic systems rely on scrambling messages so thoroughly that only a recipient with a code key can unscramble them. Quantum cryptography uses random codes lacking in any pattern that might offer clues to a code breaker. More important, it allows the parties transmitting the code to send it without the fear that it might be intercepted without their knowledge. The result? Unprecedented secrecy and security -- two commodities that are increasingly rare in a world dominated by the free flow of information. For futurists, the development of quantum cryptography is a kind of cosmic victory for personal privacy. Quantum cryptography is more powerful than any computer or eavesdropping equipment that could ever be built. Its impregnability stems from one of the quantum world's weirder but better-known features: that merely observing a quantum system changes it irreversibly. In the realm of quantum mechanics, measuring any system -- coded pulses of light, for example, in a fiber-optic cable that is infiltrated by a spy -- leaves an unalterable trace that immediately betrays the presence of an eavesdropper.

In the obscure world of computer cryptography, there may be no more self-consciously ornery group of coders than the Cypherpunks, an alliance of some of Silicon Valley's best programmers and hardware designers, who preach absolute privacy in the information age. The Cypherpunks, who often communicate among themselves by electronic mail protected with an encryption system popular in the computing underground, feel certain about one thing: The Government should not be creating a national encoding standard, as the Clinton Administration has recently proposed.