security through obscurity

[gboyce at badbelly.com (Gregory Boyce)]

On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 21:45, James R. Van Zandt wrote:
> Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com> writes:
> >
> Consider the Linux 2.6.1 kernel sources.  The .bz2 file length is
> 33240033 bytes, which uncompresses to 174358105 bytes of files (a
> compression ratio of 5.2:1) or 5919671 lines (29.4 characters,
> including the newline, per line).  
> 
> Assuming the same ratios hold for Microsoft sources, 660 MB would
> uncompress to about 3.4 GB, or 116 million lines.  That's
> substantially more than the "entire 40 million lines of code in the
> Windows operating system".

Big assumption there.  From what I've seen, bzipped tarballs seem to
have a much greater compression ratio than zip files.

-- 
Gregory Boyce <gboyce at badbelly.com>