Re: base64 and checksums

        >1. Someone propose a relatively simple checksum algorithm to be
        >applied to the content prior to encoding.

        Okay, here's a specific proposal: CRC-16.  The implementation used
        in bencode uses a 512-byte table and six integer operations per
        byte, counting table lookup as two (indexing and fetch).  The cost
        does not seem excessive, and the code is freely available.

There is also MD4 and MD5, for which the code is also freely available and
is currently specified by other Internet protocols.

Jim