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From: Ben Bacarisse <ben@bsb.me.uk>
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: Seriation
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2025 23:41:45 +0000
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> writes:

> On 10/02/2025 23:44, Ben Bacarisse wrote:
>> Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> writes:
>> 
>>> On 04/02/2025 01:31, David Entwistle wrote:
>> ...
>>>> Yes, as I recall, and as a rather sloppy adversary unaware of your
>>>> implementation, my character set ran from char(33) ! to char(126) ~. I
>>>> think it was the gap between char(95) _ and char(97) a which caused me the
>>>> most trouble. char(96) is top left on a QWERTY keyboard. I never use it,
>>>> but it gets used as an apostrophe in some text on the web. As a result
>>>> some of my checks failed to do what I expected and I didn't feel confident
>>>> posting SCOS-based ciphers.
>>>
>>> Well, blow moi down with a feather! I had no idea!
>> I think you have just forgotten.  It was brought up at the time (I have
>> a post of 7th Dec 2021 about it).
>
> Then I have indeed just forgotten. Unfortunately, my Deja News doesn't
> cover the period in question, so I can't check, but I have no reason to
> doubt you.

Well, easy to forget as it's hardly matters.  But this does raise a
question I don't recall being asked...  Do you remember why you
hand-coded a character set rather than just taking it to be ASCII 33 to
126 (inclusive)?  That would have made the code a bit simpler.  All that
occurs to me is that you might have done so to make it more fun reverse
engineer.  But then I can imagine you might have mixed up the order of
some the more obvious runs (like A to Z to 0 to 9) to make it even more
so.

Good to see you back, by the way...

-- 
Ben.