From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 94 12:01:11 PDT
To: rishab@dxm.ernet.in
Subject: Re: Schneier's source code
In-Reply-To: <gate.Ba4cLc1w165w@dxm.ernet.in>
Message-ID: <199404261901.MAA07237@netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Rishab Ghosh wrote:

> > * we also have fragments of C code accumulated and laboriously
> > developed by Bruce Schneier. How many of us have bought the C code book
> > and used the code?                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> As far as I know, there's the book, Applied Crypto, and the source code on disk.
> Are you referring to the C code within the same book, the disk, or a book of

That was a typo on my part. There is no separate "book" of code, just
the diskettes.

Someone in Cypherpunks has a novel solution: print code in the most
easily OCRable font---I think the suggestion was that OCR-A and OCR-B,
or somesuch, are optimized for this (one would think so from the
names, but I had thought they had something to do with the magnetic
ink printing on checks...).

I'm sure Schneier would be entertain the idea of a special
"exportable" version of his code in which purchasers paid the $30 he
charges and received a loose-leaf book of very neatly and precisely
printed code, ready for easy OCRing.

And why not make it error-correctable? That is, provide a printed
version that can be scanned, OCRed, then error-corrected for any minor
character recognition errors? It may not be "human-readable," (*) but
it's _printed_ and that meets the letter of the law.

(*) And I can imagine human-readable versions that have the ECC stuff
at the end of each line, or in a block below, or whatever. But this
would not be the standard, of course.


--Tim May


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