A recent 'cryptogram' (by Bruce Schneier) discusses several psuedo-crypto companies, their "secure" algorithms, and misinformation...

The complete text can be found at: www.counterpane.com. Check for the Feb. 15 edition.

Here's a brief protion:

Warning Sign #1: Pseudo-mathematical gobbledygook.

In the quote above, notice the "unique in-house developed incremental base shift algorithm." Does anyone have any idea what that means? Are there any academic papers that discuss this concept? Long noun chains don't automatically imply security

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US Data Security has another beauty: "From a mathematical point of view, the TTM algorithm is intuitively natural and less cumbersome to use than methods that are number-theory based."

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