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I have a bunch of similar data on craigslist I should write up someday.

One from 2006:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jul/20/secondworldwar.t...

"The statisticians believed that the Germans, being Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they were produced."

For some services, your growth may not be proprietary info — you may want to show incrementing IDs off, or make all your artifacts trivially discoverable.

But, if you have an internal autoincrement ID that you want to obfuscate, what's the best simple practice, minimizing token expansion?

Just use UUIDs and be done with it. I'll give you a $1 if you ever see a collision ;-)

That's a reasonable baseline suggestion, but I'd prefer any technique to generate more compact public IDs.

http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-symmetrically-encrypt-32-bit...