From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 12:06:36 +0800
To: Dave Roberts <djr@saa-cons.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Psion organisers
Message-ID: <199602090618.WAA24341@ix13.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 05:45 PM 2/2/96 +0000, Dave Roberts wrote:
>I was wondering about a couple of things regarding the Psion Series 3a 
>personal organisers.  (According to the manual, you have them in the USA 
>as well! :)
Not just in the manual, but in real life!  I hadn't thought about
the problems of bringing it through customs, though - yuk!
(I've more thought about Penn Jillette's proposal for an application
that does a Countdown to Detonation when you start up the machine,
just for the airport security people who want to be sure it's a real machine -
you could include audio :-)

>Firstly, anyone know what kind of encryption is done on documents and 
>spreadsheets held on it's internal disk?   It only allows a 10 character 
>password, and claims to encrypt the whole file.

I assume it's minimal, and unfortunately the encryption software I've
seen on the FTP sites for it has also been minimal (calling Enigma "minimal"
has a nice ring to it :-)  Porting RC4 shouldn't be too hard,
once I get the C support documentation.

The one genuine security application I have used it for has been S/Key;
typing in the challenge is a bit annoying (would be nice if the
application let you store previous challenges), but it works well.

Unlike the cool infrared communications Newtons can do between each other,
Psions have an audio-based communication that lets them squawk at each other.
I don't know how fast it is, since my machine doesn't have anyone to talk to
:-),
so I don't know if using it for digicash would be even vaguely practical.
(If it's 1200 bps, maybe - if it's 75 bps Baudot, probably not...)

#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com / billstewart@attmail.com +1-415-442-2215
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs