This whole business of compression is getting decidedly fraught – there’s always that worry about what happens if you lose the key, but Encinitas, California-based EWB & Associates Inc is proposing to create layers of extra complexity and causes for concern with a new compression system for CD-ROM called capaCD, currently in beta test, which not only features data encryption, but uses several different compression techniques and decides on the fly which is the best to use on each unit of data – it will squeeze Gigabytes onto 660Mb optical disks, but the price you pay is the worry that a single bad sector would seem to make the whole thing totally impenetrable.
