17 Dec
2003
17 Dec
'03
11:17 p.m.
On Mar 4, 3:09pm, Adam Shostack wrote:
Markoff shouyld know better than this. There is a long history of business use of codes & ciphers, going back hundereds of years, and durring the heyday of the telegraph, there were fair size companies that created codebooks with (locally configurable) superencipherment systems for the market.
I thought that, for the most part, the telegraph systems described above were to reduce cable charges (1 code word instead of a 15-word sentence, a huge savings in those days). Maybe it's the use to which the encoding's put that's controversial, not the (idea of) encoding itself.