Bassomatic

Bassomatic (sometimes written as Bass-O-Matic) were a British band, that recorded house music in the 1990s. A project of William Orbit, the band included vocalist Sharon Musgrave and rapper MC Inna Onestep amongst others. For the second album, singer Sindy Finn replaced Sharon Musgrave on vocals. Both albums were released by Guerilla Studios, founded by William Orbit with Laurie Mayer and Grant Gilbert.

Their first album was 1990s Set the Controls for the Heart of the Bass, the title track derived from Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun". This album was re-released in 1997. A subsequent album, Science and Melody, was released in 1991.

Bassomatic's biggest hit single was "Fascinating Rhythm" in 1990, which reached #9 in the UK Singles Chart, and performed well on the UK Dance Chart.

Discography

Singles

Albums

References

External links

BassOmatic

In cryptography, BassOmatic was the symmetric-key cipher designed by Phil Zimmermann as part of his email encryption software, PGP (in the first release, version 1.0). Comments in the source code indicate that he had been designing the cipher since as early as 1988, but it was not publicly released until 1991. After Eli Biham pointed out to him several serious weaknesses in the BassOmatic algorithm over lunch at the 1991 CRYPTO conference, Zimmermann replaced it with IDEA in subsequent versions of PGP.

The name is explained in this comment from the source code: "BassOmatic gets its name from an old Dan Aykroyd Saturday Night Live skit involving a blender and a whole fish. The BassOmatic algorithm does to data what the original BassOmatic did to the fish."

Algorithm

The algorithm operates on blocks of 256 bytes (or 2048 bits). The actual key size can be anywhere from 8 to 2048 bits. The 6 least-significant bits of the key are control bits, used to choose between several possible variations. The number of rounds is 1 to 8, depending on the 3 lowest control bits. Bit 4 selects between two possible key schedules: one using the key to seed a pseudorandom number generator, the other using BassOmatic itself. Making such variations key-dependent means some keys must be weaker than others; the key space is not flat.