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Re: going back to stone axes -Reply
At 2:06 PM 2/27/96 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>Ed Reed writes:
>> But there is a fundamental concern I have with your base assumption that
>> ascii, especially 7 bit ascii (the lingua franca of the SMTP world) is
>> adequate as a character set for representing something as fundamental
>> as identity representations around the world. It's not.
>
>I didn't say it was. I merely asserted that ASCII had certain benefits
>over a binary encoding that were not shared by a UNICODE encoding. My
>assertion (personal, not as chair) is that if we weren't going with
>ASCII, we wouldn't want to go with a UNICODE encoding but with a
>binary encoding.
It may be important that these data be able to be printed in a newspaper.
Consider a very paranoid whistle blower. She wants to get the public key
of the New York Times, but be protected against man in the middle attacks.
If I were her, I would feel very comfortable if the standard mechanism was
backed up by page 25 of the times, where they key itself is printed. Note
that ASCII is quite adaquate for representing binary data. Which standard
do you want? UUENCODE, BinHex, PGP-ASCII armor?
Regards - Bill
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Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting
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