| antoniof@bigfoot.com 2006-04-01, 2:37 pm |
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Digital compression is normally used to reduce the size of a file or communication without losing information content, or at least significant content. The greatest reductions are normally achieved with audio, image, and video data; however, substantial s
avings are possible even with text data. Compression can benefit the criminal trying to hide information in two ways. First, it makes the task of identifying and accessing information more difficult for the police conducting a wiretap or seizing files. Se
cond, when used prior to encryption, it can make cracking an otherwise weak cipher difficult. This is because the compressed data is more random in appearance than the original data, making it less susceptible to techniques that exploit the redundancy in
languages and multimedia formats.
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