entropy measures

Dean:

Where does uuencoded [compressed] binary lie? I would suspect it lies right around where encrypted text is.

Right.

Presumably straight encrypted text is statistically random [7..8], but that when you encrypt to just the ascii subset is when you lose the entropy.

Exactly. uuencoding will have a slightly lower single-character entropy than the ASCII armor PGP uses because just about every line begins with the letter 'M'. This will skew the distribution slightly. But a better way of distinguishing uuencoding and ascii armor is to see that in falls in the same entropy class, and then just looking at the alphabetic subsets used. Eric