Re: The lost key

Richard Heathfield wrote:

On 29/03/2025 22:43, Mini Mailer wrote:

SCOS is not well thought out. It should use the base64
alphabet

 
It does. It just doesn't confine itself to that alphabet.
 

and allow binary encoding as well.

 
Your comment is not well thought out. You should have stopped to think
about what SCOS is /for/. Complaining about lack of support for binary
encoding is like complaining that your car can't drive on rivers.

Well, a beautiful base64 output, with 64 chars per line, is a nice feature
and does not look so ugly, like your versions output and binary support is
a welcome addition. Why, you may ask? Because it can replace a standard
base64 encoder and allows to use key values from 0-63, so that third parties
do not know it is a SCOS message or a Standard base64 encoded message. :-)

SCOS was designed to be a very light layer of encryption over sci.crypt
chit-chat, and almost as easy to crack as ROT-13. It wasn't designed to
encode binaries because Usenet is a text medium, and because people
don't generally chit-chat in binaries.

See my above comment.

Here is an example message with v3, for a text medium like Usenet. :-)

$ echo "Hello sci.crypt community! I wish you a nice weekend! :-)" | scos3 e 47 11
BAa82stcjIqR+kWG9B20TcubSYCN+Ue4tspQNYSTBJKwblOjccWBz861vYBYgEuJ
Jwa+0o1cV0RR1e==

$ echo "Hello sci.crypt community! I wish you a nice weekend! :-)" | scos3 e 47 11 | scos3 d 47 11
Hello sci.crypt community! I wish you a nice weekend! :-)

And of course with binary support as well. :-)