At 11:56 AM 3/14/96 GMT, bruce@omega.co.nz wrote:

The "entropy" or randomness of audio data is LOW. That's why audio compresses so well. However, the idea of keeping a one-time key on CD-ROM is good.

Actually, the idea's not real good - CDROMs are easy to keep around, last a long time, and are generally not eraseable - this encourages using them as a More Than One Time Pad, which is a really bad idea..... Tape is better - it's easy to write garbage over it as you go along, it doesn't have that feel of permanence about it, and it's easy to use for something else besides selling as Musique Concre'te or Rainforest Ocean Background Harmonies. If you're going to use audio as a source, even FM radio hiss (using one of those new radio-in-your-PC cards), compress it first, then feed it to some encryption algorithm or shove it through MD5 to lose any remaining patterns if you can. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissable." - US government statement on China...