Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!usc!dianne.usc.edu!blarson
From: blarson@dianne.usc.edu (bob larson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Anyone interested in end-to-end checksums in news?
Message-ID: <21314@usc.edu>
Date: 20 Nov 89 05:17:14 GMT
References: <1989Nov16.173546.6101@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Nov18.185648.3525@NCoast.ORG>
Sender: news@usc.edu
Reply-To: blarson@dianne.usc.edu (bob larson)
Organization: USC AIS, Los Angeles
Lines: 19

In article <1989Nov18.185648.3525@NCoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>Checksumming can't be relied upon in the case of ASCII <-> EBCDIC translations

Protection against non-invertable translations is one of the reasons
for the "checksum" (should be crc) as far as I am conserned.  Remember
all the problems caused when one of the RN (?) patches was mangled to
a significant portion of the net due to a nonstandard news feed (via
BITNET) that expanded a tab to spaces?  Invertable transformations
shouldn't be a problem, it's just a little harder to computate the crc
on the system that decides not to store articles in ASCII.

Having just the sites that have multiple redundant feeds drop mashed
articles would be a big help reducing the number of such articles
propigating.  (usc is such a site.)

-- 
Bob Larson	blarson@dianne.usc.edu		usc!dianne!blarson
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