From: "Rev. Mark Grant" <mark@unicorn.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 1995 09:25:44 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: NSA, ITAR, NCSA and plug-in hooks.
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9511162243.A5545-0100000@unicorn.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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.

How about command-line compression options. Gzip, for example, allows you
to specify how good you want the compression to be, with better
compression taking longer. So you could justify passing a set of options
to the compression algorithm, which could also be used to pass key 
information to the encryption algorithm. In fact, you could pass in a 
void * pointer to options that had been set up in a preferences panel in 
the application, which would be provided by the plug-in compression or 
encryption code. That structure could then have anything you wanted in it.

Also, I'm not sure you'd need to pass a key, surely the encryption code 
could do all the key-handling itself ?

	Mark