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.