Hello Kurgan, Tuesday, June 25, 2002, 6:27:21 PM, you wrote:
KLc> Just curious, but what exactly *is* rot13? Sounds interesting. ROT13 is a method of 'encrypting' messages. Well, ok, it really is encryption, buts its such a weak form of it its not used for security. The ROT stands for rotate, and 13 is the number of places. IE, rotate each charector 13 spaces through the alphabet. Thus A becomes N, B becomes O and so forth. ROT(n) stands for rotate N letters, so you can ROT14 if you wanted. The benifit of ROT13 is that the english language has 26 letters, so rather than having to have 2 programs(or functions) - one for encrypting and one for decrypting, you can instead use the same function to encrypt and decrypt(first pass, A becomes N, second pass N becomes A) It's main usage was for spoilers, flames, etc. The idea being you 'encrypt' potentially offensive messages sent to public mailing lists/newsgroups as a warning for those easily offended. If someone goes to the effort of decrypting your post and takes offense at the content - well, they WERE warned. I also see it used as an alternate method of encryping email addresses. I've seen a number of posts on usenet where the signature is 'echo <ROT13 encrypted email address> | rot13'. Which is a unixish type way of saying send this text through the rot13 program to find out my email address. A simple method of spambot avoidance, similiar to the way many people encrypt email addresses for mailto links. Its not a secure mechanism, but as long as MOST people aren't using such methods, spambots will continue to be written to find only the easy fish. -- Best regards, Gary mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________ Current Ver: 1.60q FAQ : http://faq.thebat.dutaint.com Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives : http://tbudl.thebat.dutaint.com Moderators : mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TBTech List: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Bug Reports: https://www.ritlabs.com/bt/
