What the TXOR is Good for

Posted Aug 12, 2013 10:14 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: What the TXOR is Good for by martin_vahi
Parent article: Gräßlin: FLOSS after Prism: Privacy by Default

if you never have to interact with anything but your own software, you never have to convert strings from one representation to another (at which point TXOR doesn't save you anything)

But as soon as you need to deal with other software, you have to agree on a representation to use (at that point TXOR doesn't avoid needing to convert the data)

Java is stuck using UTF16 for legacy reasons, but everyone else has recognized that UTF8 is much more efficiant as a practical matter.

Why raw Bitstreams are Shaky

Posted Aug 12, 2013 16:09 UTC (Mon) by martin_vahi (guest, #92302) [Link] (2 responses)

Thank You for Your answer.

What about conversion between the UTF-8 (PHP, databases) and the UTF-16 (JavaScript)?

How to make sure that the decrypted_bitstream_2_string will not become jet-another-Y2K-UNIX-2038-problem after a Unicode standard update?

An attempt to write bitstream2string at one of the answers of the http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1240408/reading-bytes-from-a-javascript-string contains some Unicode specific constants, that probably have to be updated after a Unicode standard update.

Such library updates are not possible, either due to limited amount of development time or by mere lack of (legal) access to client's servers.

Why raw Bitstreams are Shaky

Posted Aug 12, 2013 21:17 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

if you have javascript talking directly to a database, something is wrong.

you should have javascript talking to a process on your server, and that process on your server will talk to a database.

That server process is going to have to convert the data from one format to another at some point, TXOR doesn't eliminate the need to do that.

If the UTF16 specifications change in a way that's incompatible with the exiting deployed data, the updated specifications are going to be ignored. The existing data is not going to be thrown away just because someone wants to change a spec. So your worries about how to handle such a problem are meaningless.

Why raw Bitstreams are Shaky

Posted Aug 23, 2013 2:03 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

> if you have javascript talking directly to a database, something is wrong.

One takes it you're not a NodeJS fan. :)