Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 08:40:09 -0800
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Marc Briceno <marc@digicash.com>

# Printed Ecash decoder now available

Ian Goldberg <iang@cs.berkeley.edu> won the second part of the "turn Ecash into 2-D bar code and back into an Ecash payment" contest. Building on Jeremey Barrett's Ecash -> PDF417 encoder, Ian wrote an Ecash PDF417 encoder and decoder.

> http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/tools/pdf417-1.0.tar.gz

It is now possible to print Ecash on a laser printer and scan it back in on a standard flat bed scanner. Possible applications include sending Ecash by fax or mail.

Ian notes the following:

> "Also: these are general PDF417 tools; they can be used to encode any binary data, not just ecash (the decoder will not be able to decode arbitrary barcodes; it doesn't know about "numeric compaction" mode and other things in the spec that the encoder doesn't actually use)."

Congratulations to Ian for this accomplishment!