CDR: Re: Anonymous Remailers cpunk

[Ken Brown]

Steve Furlong wrote:
 

> Why not just read the first 20 bytes of the body? If 90% or more aren't
> printable ASCII assume the message is encrypted.

Or compressed, or a bitmap, or executable code, or coming from an EBCDIC
machine, or using a weird variant of Unicode that you weren't previously
aware of, or audio, or video...

Without a header at the front saying "This is PGP version such-and-such"
(or whatever other algorithm is used) there is no way to tell
well-encrypted text from some sorts of  compressed files.  That is part
of the point - if the encrypted text was obviously different from random
data the difference could contain clues.

Ken