"Moe Trin" wrote:

> 1. Encrypt something to the same length: Any number of algorithms that
> have been developed over the centuries. For a crude example, read the
> man page on that wonky browser you're using, and discover "rot-13"

Firefox is becoming quite popular now. Are there less-wonky graphical
(as opposed to text only) browsers that you would recommend? I'll take
it as understood that you wouldn't recommend a browser for reading a
newsgroup.

> 2. Encrypt something to a shorter length: Two techniques should leap
> out at you - data compression first, then any encryption - or changing
> character sets using something like 'mimencode'

> mimencode (1) - Translate to and from mail-oriented encoding formats

MIME encoding makes things longer (e.g. base64) unless there is a
packing scheme I'm unaware of; in which case it would be compression.