NSA, ITAR, NCSA and plug-in hooks.

[Simon Spero]

On Thu, 16 Nov 1995, Scott Brickner wrote:
> 
> You'd need a program which not only *accepted* the additional parameter,
> but also *needed* the second parameter.  I confess I have some difficulty
> thinking of one.

It's not too hard to think of a compression scheme that needs extra 
information to be passed from client to server; the obvious example is 
some sort of dictionary compression with external dictionaries (can be 
very effective for short messages where LZW etc never get a chance to get 
going). 

Another, more likely case, is where the object could have been compressed 
by several schemes, and a scheme ID is needed to determine which 
alogorithm to use. 

The real issue would appear to be intent, though. If it's obvious that 
the real intention for the hook is to allow encryption to be added, 
the State department can jump on it.