Re: why I like having a proprietary archive format

[toh@freenet.Victoria.BC.CA (Marc Sira)]

In our last episode, shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford) said:

>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

This, if it were at all a valid argument, would merely argue toward
Security through Obscurity. This is a poor method of securing anything;
go bring it up on comp.security.misc if you'd like the full flamewar. :)

In fact it's not a valid observation anyway. Any reasonable password-protection
scheme for an archive compressor works by permuting the archived information
against the key (the password). Without the key, the information in the
archive is in fact incomplete and can't be retrieved, regardless of whether
you know the compression scheme that was used. It makes perfect sense to do
this, when you think about what archivers (and most lossless compression
methods) have to do in the course of their work anyway - there's not a lot of
extra cost involved in adding a key.

Software patents and proprietary algorithms may appeal to certain people
for other reasons (they do not appeal to me), but I don't think anyone would
use obscurity (seen as a tool) as a forceful argument for them (the only real
arguments are economic, and those are shortsighted at best).

-- 
Marc Sira                  |
toh@freenet.victoria.bc.ca | "Your god drinks...p-p-peach nectar!"
aa382@freenet.carleton.ca  '