On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Fergal Suipeil wrote: > Hi, > > On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Christopher Ferraro wrote: > > > Can you read these .jobh messages with notepad or any other application ? > > > > They seem to be encrypted someway. > > It's a form of weak proprietary encryption called EBCDIC. It was in > widespread use in the latter half of the last century, but fell into > disuse as stronger forms of encryption became available. It's based > roughly on the idea of exchanging sets of characters. First you swap > the numbers with the letters, then you swap uppercase and lowercase, > and finally to confuse people who think they've decoded the letters > you put groups of punctuation in at random. People who know what I'm > talking about will also know that I'm joking (mostly :-) Huh? EBCDIC is not an encryption scheme. Its simply the way IBM mainframes represent data internally. EBCDIC on IBM mainframes is analogous to ASCII on personal computers.