[LINK] Military cipher broken

[Craig Sanders]

On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 10:41:28AM +1000, Alan Hargreaves wrote:
> The question that appears to have been glossed over is:

that's because it's not an interesting or useful question, any more than
asking why it was on a hard disk or a tape or hard copy would be.

>       "If this was a document under development (as implied by the
>       term draft), what was it doing on a CD?"

why not?  CDs are convenient, they store about 500 times as much as a
floppy, unlike magnetic media there's not even a miniscule chance they
might be erased by airport xray etc scanners, and CD-ROM drives are
standard in computers these days (and have been for the last decade)

the first point is probably the most significant - you can't fit even a
2MB document onto a 1.44MB floppy...but CD blanks are so cheap that even
if you waste the remaining approx 700MB, it doesn't matter.


of course, a USB flash drive is even better than CD, but support for
them is still not even close to being ubiquitous - perhaps 70% or 80% of
computers rather than 99+%.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>           (part time cyborg)