[TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 29/01/2021 17:02, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Jan 2021, John Cowan wrote:
>
>> I've been messing around with X.680, aka ASN/1.  Its reputation for 
>> horrible evilness, I find, primarily comes from the Packed Encoding 
>> Rules and the interface with statically typed languages, both of 
>> which require dealing with the schema language programmatically.  But 
>> if you want to drive it from a dynamically typed language, it's dirt 
>> simple: to write, see what data type you have, output a type and 
>> length and value (or type and value and terminator), and there you are.
>
> I was never quite sure what to make of ASN.1 and BER; it seemed to 
> solve the problem of OpenLDAP applications talking to each other (and 
> I got quite good at reading wire traces), but it somehow seemed wrong 
> when every box was running FreeBSD on Intel/AMD.
>
> -- Dave
BER does not work for digital signatures (because encodings are not 
unique), hence DER.

N.