[Cryptography] Uniform Data Fingerprint

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Arnold Reinhold <agr at me.com> wrote:

> A small suggestion: instead of slavishly following RFC4648 Base-32 format,
> I would suggest a modified Base-32 where the letters I, O, and L  are
> excluded from the encoding alphabet as they are too easily confused with
> the digits 0 and 1 (L being confusing in lower case). Maybe exclude S as
> well for potential confusion with 5. Only 32 of the possible 36 characters
> are needed, so excluding three or four characters poses no technical
> problem. Here is a worst-case example I concocted: 0lSS0-l1151-I5S1O-I05S1
> Of course the potential for confusion is font dependent but I don’t think
> it is practical to specify fonts in such a standard.
>
> Since the fingerprint strings are intended for human recognition, we
> should do everything possible to minimize confusion.  At the standards
> writing stage, this is a cheap improvement.
>

Base32 does the same thing by excluding the corresponding numbers. Of
course, both could be less confusing. The coding was originally proposed by
Phil Zimmerman.

Maybe an explanatory note...
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