[Noisebridge-discuss] File format specification

[Daniel C. Silverstein]

+1



On Mar 18, 2010, at 5:49 PM, John Adams <jna at retina.net> wrote:

> The leading interchange format right now is JSON. Nothing on that
> stripe is going to be that large, so why not json?
> -j
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Mar 18, 2010, at 19:21, Jacob Appelbaum <jacob at appelbaum.net>  
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm working on a new file format for magnetic stripe information. I'm
>> calling it MagPack. There are many dirty hacks but I don't believe
>> there
>> are any actual open standards. If someone knows otherwise, I'd be
>> happy
>> to be corrected!
>>
>> Here is an introduction to some of the details and ideas:
>> http://code.google.com/p/libmsr/source/browse/trunk/README.file-specification
>>
>> The next step is to define a structure for captured data and for
>> relevant meta-data. I'm starting to ponder the actual format of the
>> data
>> on disk. There are many options (please not xml!) but it's unclear on
>> what is the most cross platform, least external library dependent,
>> easy
>> to use, easy to protect, easy to compress, etc.
>>
>> There are a variable number of elements for a given captured signal.
>> Assuming that a user has a simple ISO formatted magnetic stripe, it's
>> quite simple to store it as a byte array. It is important to include
>> meta-data about the capture (date, time, reader, host OS platform,
>> etc)
>> in any MagPack file. It's also important to allow repacking, re-
>> encoding
>> and other stuff. I'd like to be able to encrypt a MagPack file, so  
>> the
>> contents should probably be properly encapsulated...
>>
>> The data captured is entirely arbitrary. It may contain any byte
>> sequence. It will certainly contain binary information (from raw bit
>> patterned reads), it will possibly have blobs of images (png, bmp,
>> etc),
>> it will hopefully have UTF-8 strings for any field related to the
>> meta-data...
>>
>> What's a reasonable way to accomplish this? Should I just stick with
>> the
>> simple "bunch of files in a folder, tar, gzip, possibly encrypt"
>> method?
>> Should I get fancy and use XML, possibly encrypting the .xml file  
>> with
>> an unencrypted header?
>>
>> In an ideal world, I'd like to do it entirely in pure C and in a
>> portable manner. This tends to push me away from XML and then there's
>> XML that pushes me away from XML. But is a custom binary format
>> better?
>> Isn't that why XML was invented? To solve just this problem?
>>
>> Best,
>> Jake
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss