[MUD-Dev] Re: Encryption of protocols, compression and lag...

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> This lends itself to certain possibilities. You *could* create software
> which DOES NOT ENCRYPT -- but which allows encryption when a user-supplied
> library is available. Ideally, this would be done at runtime. You could
> provide an "example" description which specified your proposed standards
> for the encryption library, and then hope that someone out there wrote
> one... or you could coordinate (as has been suggested) with another
> developer outside the US, who would develop the encryption library prior to
> release and then just have it available for download on his internet site.
> Alternately, you could use an already-available dynamic library from a
> non-US source.

Well, Caliban, if you or somebody else on this list really have this
problem, then I simply suggest that you send me a mail with pointers to your
software and the crypto DLL.  I will then simply add the DLL to your zipfile
and put it on a scandinavian ftp-site.  Import of encryption code isn't
illegal is it? (On the hysterical side, any programming toolkit with a
decent random generator is clearly an encryption library. And what about
sound editors? Would you US guys really worry about adding noise to a
signal??? Anyway, I believe PGP was exported as printouts and has been
OCRed.)

Is, however, encrypting the protocols A Good Idea (tm)?  I would think not,
unless you compress the stream first.  Wouldn't encryption just increase
bandwidth? I don't know much about the telecom network, but modems does at
least try to compress their stream (if compression is turned on) and you
would like to exploit that piece of hardware, or wouldn't you? I don't know
much about the compression algorithms used in modems, but I guess they could
contribute to lag if they are waiting for buffers to fill up, before sending
out data.  Is this a significant problem? If it is, then I guess it would be
somewhat optimistic to ask the user to turn off compression (although I
think I've seen some gaming networks ask their customers to do that if they
experience lag).  Would zeropadding help?  Maybe someone on the list is
up-to-date on modem compression technology?  I'm listening... :) (ring mode
on)

--
Ola Fosheim Groestad,Norway      http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~olag/worlds/