Re: why I like having a proprietary archive format

[johnlb@primenet.com (John Bowling)]

In article <5gqjf7$3hm$1@europa.frii.com>,
Randy Shackelford <shack@deimos.frii.com> wrote:
>I've read Nathan's bellows about how Stuffit uses a proprietary format for
>its files so many times now, I thought I'd tell anyone who cares why it's
>a good idea to have such a format. It's good for a simple reason: password
>protection. If you want a form of security for your archives, you don't
>want any ol' schmuck to write a program to unarchive the files. If that were
>possible, someone could implement an unarchiver which doesn't support
>password protection, and your security goes right into the crapper.
>But happily, Stuffit can archive in other formats, zip, unix compress, and
>tar to name three. I had heard talk at one time that Aladdin was interested
>in adding NuFX support as well. Naturally I use native Stuffit format for 
>practically everything myself. Anyhow, here's another point of view on
>why proprietary formats exist.

If you really want security for data that's archived, it should also be
encrypted.  Even if someone has written a program that will uncompress
an archive, it won't un-encrypt it without the key, and the only one who
has that is the person who encrypted it and those few individuals they
gave it to.

So your reason for not giving out the compression method doesn't make
realistic sense.

John

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- John Bowling          -- Shouldn't you be commuting by bicycle?
- johnlb@primenet.com   -- No, that's not a valid excuse!
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