> This is a pet project of mine. Unfortunatly, I see little point in doing > this whilst passwords are not supported. I was told on hurd-help that USA > encryption laws prevent them from including the algorhythm that does > password checks :(. I think recompiling hurd may solve this, but I've > never done that before.
I fail to see how boot floppies and encrypted passwords relate. But anyway, the hurd most certainly supports encrypted passwords, the very same code used on linux. Just like all US-based distributions, it cannot include the encryption code directly; you must get it from a non-US source (see the glibc README).