Plain text is already a numeric encoding of information. Any file is just a big number in binary. If it is illegal for me to sell your credit card number in plaintext then surely the same should apply to encoding the same information in some other trivial way. Talking about "illegal primes" is supposed to make it sound ridiculous, but you could just call it illegal information exchange. Most people would agree at least some forms of information exchange should be illegal - threats, stolen passwords or stolen private pictures for example.
Context and intention matters for the law - if your message is a numerically encoded death threat and the intended recipient already knows how to decode it (e.g because you sent the key in a previous message) then it would be reasonable to call the cops.
Whether the CSS key should be illegal to share is a different discussion.
This line of argument is rather asinine - any information can obviously be encoded into a number, prime or otherwise. Given that there are infinite primes and any amount of proscribed information (national security information, child pornography, trade secrets etc) that can be encoded into them, essentially all prime numbers would be deemed "illegal" under that line of argument.
The authors are clearly targeting unsophisticated audience with that article; feels like the "sovereign citizen" grade of legal analysis.
> This line of argument is rather asinine - any information can obviously be encoded into a number, prime or otherwise. Given that there are infinite primes and any amount of proscribed information (national security information, child pornography, trade secrets etc) that can be encoded into them, essentially all prime numbers would be deemed "illegal" under that line of argument.
I think its asininity (or whatever) is the point. The idea that information can be illegal leads, I think ineluctably, to the 'illegal primes'; so I think that this is meant as a slightly snarky argument against the idea that information can be illegal.
Is the article making much of an argument? It's a wikipedia article and is therefore written in an encyclopedic tone. Do you disagree that illegal numbers exist?
It has an "encyclopedic tone" but that does not mean it is objectively correct or makes a sensible argument. It is not the number itself that is illegal. What would that even mean?
Humans doing certain things with certain intentions can be illegal.
The article links to "illegal numbers", which weasely states "if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well". Note the "may", and the only references seem to be pure speculation.
Some people argue any kind of copyright and IP rights should be abolished, but who would argue it should be completely legal to phone in a bomb threat because "it is really just a number represented as sound"?
Well yes, the notion of illegal numbers is a construct of the silly argument presented. You can decompose anything proscribed into the elements that make it up and then try to claim the elements are ipso facto proscribed.
Mens rea, for example, is really referring to sequences of electrical impulses in your brain, so again by the line of argument there is a physical phenomenon that is criminial.
Excellent point. To put it another way, all Facebook did was to share some numbers with Cambridge Analytical who did some math with those numbers and shared those further with the Trump campaign. Why is everybody upset over math?
Context is everything. The number 123456789 is not illegal.
But if associated with other information such that this value is understood to be a social security number (if it were a valid SSN), it becomes illegal to share it, or even have it, in some circumstances.
SSNs are sequential; the numbers adjacent to your own are valid. Surely you cannot bypass data privacy requirements by applying a trivial and reversible transportation like +/- 1, so knowledge of your own social security number would be illegal under your logic.
It doesn’t make sense to think of SSNs as stolen identities unless the thief knows the names associated with them.
The article is based on a false premise. The government does not make any bits legal or illegal. It prohibits specific human actions: copying, selling, using, etc.
Bits have no color. But human beings do different things in order to develop different bit sequences. Take the bit sequence corresponding to a movie. The bits have no color. But that’s irrelevant. What matters is what you did to get that information. If you can prove that the bits came from an RNG that’s not copyright infringement. Likewise, if you recompress a file you copied and totally change the bit sequence, it’s still infringement. The law doesn’t care about the bits; they are tangential to human actions.
Saying that “certain bit sequences are illegal” is reductio ad absurdum like saying that laws against battery amount to making certain sequences of muscle fiber contractions illegal. The law doesn’t care about the muscle fibers that contracted; that is entirely incidential to the fact that you punched someone.
What is the false premise? The linked article http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 is saying the same thing you are, with an in-depth explanation.
The article isn't great in how it explains, and it's unfriendly toward the legal profession, but it makes the same claims you do.
rayiner:
> If you can prove that the bits came from an RNG that’s not copyright infringement.
article:
> It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator.
The false premise is that the law cares about any combination of bits and/or metadata. Even talking about "provenance" is misleading, because that puts the focus on the data.
The law regulates human conduct; crimes require a human action combined with a human state of mind. Things (bits, guns, etc.) are relevant to the extent that people take actions with them. To address the RNG example: the law doesn't care about whether the bits came from an RNG or an original copy per se. The law cares about those things only to the extent that they imply that someone generated the bits randomly versus copying them from the original. (Note the focus on verbs.)
In the RNG example the distinction does not matter, but consider something like insider information about an upcoming merger. The provenance is a leak from someone inside the company. Whether it is legal or illegal depends on what you do with it (trade on it versus publish it), and what you were thinking when you did it (even if you trade on it, if you didn't know it was insider information then there is no crime).
And yet quantitatively, these "Illegal primes" aren't anywhere near the information content of a movie.
We can try applying your narrative to the number 3.14, supposing laws had made finding the circumference of a circle illegal. Sure, "3.14" isn't illegal on its own (and sometimes it even shows up in the amount of change you're owed). But referencing the number is basically referencing a specific use. And so we can infer that the people broadcasting the number are doing so to highlight how easy finding the circumference of a circle is, and thus induce people to do so.
The informational content of 3.14 is say 12 bits and the original AACS key is 128 bits. Whereas a movie is roughly 10,000,000,000 bits, and even a song is around 32,000,000 bits. These "illegal primes" are very close, if not in, the domain of bona fide facts. And the law generally doesn't criminalize facts (like 3.14), although not for lack of trying!
> We can try applying your narrative to the number 3.14, supposing laws had made finding the circumference of a circle illegal.
> The informational content of 3.14 is say 12 bits and the original AACS key is 128 bits.
3.14 is irrelevant for finding the circumference of a circle (from its radius, I guess you meant); it is π that is relevant for finding the circumference, and (conjecturally) the informational content of π is infinite.
I knew I was bound to get this type of comment. The error resulting from representing pi as 3.14 is much less than the PSNR resulting from representing a feature movie using 10Gb. Be thankful I didn't use "3".
> I knew I was going to get this type of comment. The error resulting from representing pi as 3.14 is much less than the PSNR resulting from representing a common movie using 10Gb. Be thankful I didn't use "3".
The comment may have been predictable, but it doesn't seem to me to be invalid. The error resulting from representing π as 3.14 is relatively small numerically, but, in terms of information loss, it is (conjecturally) infinite. (The information encoded in the 1000th decimal place is, information-theoretically though not numerically, just as significant as that encoded in the 1st decimal place.) It therefore seems to me to be false that it is much less than the (finite) error resulting from representing a common movie using 10 Gb.
You are talking about the "content" bits. These illegal primes do not represent copyrighted/authored works, they are the secret decoding keys (remember DeCSS?) that are crucial to securing certain forms of DRM. As such, they are more like trade secrets. But trade secrets don't have much legal protection, so the industry got wise and helped write some new laws (to call them copyright, among other things) and can now further protect/entrench themselves.
OK, I may have missed that, but not all illegal primes are content, so not all of them are subject to the copyright legal regime. Hence, the DMCA exists to close those gaps by declaring new kinds/classes of numbers to be illegal.
Came here to repost exactly that, thanks! I second the recommendation - this piece contains insights crucial to understand the perspective of the law wrt. all things digital.
If I were to shorten it to one sentence, it would be this: the law doesn't deal with static, mathematical reality. It considers provenance.
As computer scientists and hackers at heart, we all know that text, numbers, pictures, music, movies can be represented in each other (most likely, everything ist represented as a list of numbers, i.e. a bytestring, i.e. a file, nowadays).
The interesting part here is the obvious contradiction that prime numbers seem innocent but in the end, they are numbers, and numbers can represent anything.
Again, the obvious question to rise here is: How is it possible that a government can forbid information?
The subtle thing that I think the notion of 'illegal prime' misses is that it's not actually the prime number that is illegal.
To complete the 'illegality' you need three pieces of information used in tandem:
1) the prime number (which is innocent in its own right)
2) the decompression algorithm (also innocent in its own right)
3) the knowledge that some specific prime number, when viewed through the lens of the decompression algorithm, yields an 'illegal' interpretation. (not illegal in its own right?)
The issue only comes from all three being present. If you have #2 and #3, #1 can be the last puzzle piece needed to create the required set, but no one piece is in-and-of-itself the source of the issue.
I think you need a fourth element: intent to produce the illegal representation.
Of course, if the compression algorithm is one that's very commonly used like gzip or jpeg, a jury will infer intent from the totality of the circumstances and your lawyer will have a really hard time talking them out of it.
Most techies seem to take away the lesson you’re positing here. But it seems to me that the real lesson is that “is prime” and “is innocent” are orthogonal concepts. Why is it so strange that some prime numbers represent data you’re not allowed to distribute or even possess? Primes aren’t that rare. “Illegal prime” isn’t much different from “illegal odd number” or “illegal number where exactly half the bits are set to 1.”
Yeah, totally. It's entirely reasonable that governments can restrict SOME kind of information exchange, and since all information is just numbers, of course you could find "illegal primes"
For instance, if you encoded the entire design of a nuclear weapon (or some other highly classified military secret) inside a prime, saying "but it's just a prime!" is a very silly excuse for exchanging that information. The question is: "what kind of information should be illegal to exchange", not "which format of information should be protected".
In my opinion, I don't think it's the number itself that's illegal, but the metadata that you attach to it.
"11234349387298245791029384857" may or may not be an illegal number. Nobody cares and mathematicians can use it to their heart's content. That is, until I attach the metadata to it: "This number is the AES key embedded in every YthnVideo Disc Player". Now it's illegal. Number = legal. Number + metadata = illegal.
The tricky bit there is in how metadata may come to be attached. If there exists a list of web pages, each of which contains a single prime number, then that list is legal, yes?
If from a completely different domain, someone who has no relationship whatsoever to the maintainer of that first site creates a page explaining how DVD players contain AES keys and then links to one of the pages on the first page, from the perspective of a web user, that's number + metadata = illegal, right? And yet the number itself is legal. And the text by itself is legal. The combination is illegal, but the combination doesn't really exist.
Of course, the answer is probably that the text is illegal in the US, because the DMCA overrides the first amendment. Whether the text includes the number or a link to the number, it all interferes with the ability of a company to make money, so it's illegal.
> If from a completely different domain, someone who has no relationship whatsoever to the maintainer of that first site creates a page explaining how DVD players contain AES keys and then links
The link is the illegal metadata. It's fine to explain that DVD players use cryptographic keys. It's fine to explain how said keys work. It's fine to have a list of prime numbers on your website for fun. It's not okay to link the two together. The link itself is exactly the type of illegal metadata I'm talking about.
Any type of pointing, eyebrow wiggling, coughing, etc. providing people with metadata on why certain numbers have cryptographic significance for a particular product is not okay (in my opinion).
That description can be embedded in the number. If you use ASCII it’ll be pretty obvious.
Encoding as a prime doesn’t impose any special requirements on the data. All you have to do is append a bit of junk to make the whole thing prime. The rest of it can be plain text or whatever.
> That description can be embedded in the number. If you use ASCII it’ll be pretty obvious.
In that case, the knowledge that information is encoded in that specific number and the drawing attention to that fact is the illegal metadata. In other words, numbers are just numbers - until you draw attention to specific numbers with metadata, that's when you cross the line.
If you make a website with a prominently displayed huge prime number with flashing lights and arrows, you've added illegal metadata that says "try decoding me" or "I am probably a cryptographic key to something"
That seems like a pretty loose definition of “metadata.” And the number would be illegal no matter which medium you distribute it with. The mere act of distributing it (or just possessing it) is enough.
> A government can be defined as "a public organization for the systematic and systemic persecution and elimination of minorities"
Yes, but that would be a silly definition; governments rarely persecute as an end goal.
A more sensible one would be: a government is what controls a state, and a state is an organisation with a monopoly of legitimate force on an area of land.
Can you name a government that does not systemically and systematically persecute murderers? Pedophiles? Tax evaders? Drug users? The list goes on. Minorities are not limited to race, gender and the like.
The persecution perspective raises several ideas to the surface that get buried under the monopoly of force definition. The latter is concerned with collection of power, but the former is concerned with the use of power. Further, in countries such as the US, there are numerous arms among the citizens and the government cannot be truly said to have a monopoly of force (disproving the definition at least in part).
To what end is a monopoly of force? There is always a moral judgement in the use of power and always a line in the sand concerning who should be persecuted. Sometimes that line is murderers and sometimes it is homosexuality or saying things the majority disagree with.
Further, the persecution definition is more accurate in that it places the responsibility into the correct hands. Governments are formed by the people who consent to them and have no life of themselves. Even in a place like North Korea, most people endorse a government that most of us find horrible. The position of that line of persecution isn't determined solely by government fiat -- it is a result of the people's consent and inaction.
A government would find catching murderers impossible if the general population did not (as a majority) support and help them. Slaves would not have escaped from the South in any significant number if so many people in the North had not consented. Likewise, lynchings, kangaroo courts, and Jim Crow would not happen if the majority of people had not consented.
Very importantly, this view forces home the effects of intolerance. When a large group of people silence their opposition "freedom of speech isn't freedom from repercussions" they are in fact exercising this exact type of governmental persecution power, but without the tolerance that is otherwise "agreed" upon.
This raises what is (to me) the most interesting argument of all. Speaking of the US. We agree that the government cannot punish people for controversial, but non-inciteful speech. We are the government ("by the people"). We simultaneously agree that we can do the exact opposite in our personal lives and ruin someone we disagree with. This shows our true line in the sand is very much not in sync with the one we voted for and illustrates a very complex, but dangerous cognitive dissonance.
I could go on, but this lens is the most useful one I've seen for looking at how society, morality, and government interact.
> How is it possible that a government can forbid information?
I think that intent and plausibility play the most important roles here.
Also, if the number of bits you need to describe an illegal prime is of the same order as the number of bits in the prime itself, then you have a weak case.
Yep. A prime-based compression algorithm is possible, but if you don't store the whole number, it will take forever to calculate.
How are you going to describe it? Are you going to say it's the Nth prime, so go ahead and calculate all (N-1) primes to find it? That's a lot of primes. And by that point it's not any different than sharing data with any other (sane) compression algorithms.
Encoding information this way is really cool, but offers no advantages.
It won't work. There are 37,607,912,018 prime numbers smaller than 1,000,000,000,000. It's 11 decimal digits vs. 13. All the compression comes from the information that it is a prime number.
To point to the "Nth prime" would require almost as many digits as the prime itself. Mabe it's more efficient for very large primes, but I don't think so.
There are a lot of easily describable primes, like the Mersenne primes. A lot of numbers can be described in fewer bits than directly. This is not always the case, but you could just keep looking for another more easily describable prime or broaden the search space to include non-destructive modifications of the data you're representing.
"It is a bit string" is true. "It is a top secret document" is also true. Why would the law look at only the first and not the second?
I sometimes make the joke that unicode sequences make people extremely angry. It's a gentle reminder not to take everything so seriously. But everyone still understands that it isn't actually the sequential placement of glyphs that make people angry.
Hey, we manage pretty well to get people to fill out complicated paper forms to calculate their taxes, so certainly it's feasible to enforce laws despite the obvious practical impossibility of actually physically forcing everyone to obey them.
Yeah, that's what happens when you threaten them to deprive them of their freedom, to torture, and to murder them. Perhaps you are so civilized you resort to fines first, but what if they decide to not pay said fine? Are you going to put them in prison? What if they resist being mugged and kidnapped? How are you going to get them to prison if they resist? I suggest you search for many instances of the IRS shooting innocent people, they literally have armed squads for that purpose, they flashbang babies, etc.
Are you really surprised that most of them comply? What other choice do they have?
Are you sure that's the whole of the definition from the source you took it from? It looks suspiciously like a fragment of the definition on en.oxforddictionaries.com, omitting the part of the definition that is more general.
Yes. Consider a detailed blueprint for a physical weapon. Or information that make coordinated use of armed forces more efficient. Or blackmailing material.
If you want to have the argument that a "thing" can mean "information" I wish you all the luck in getting a partner that agrees with you. Personally it's both for me, depending on the occasion.
Are you really asking if it's possible to forbid information? It's possible because they have people with guns who will physically take you to jail. But maybe you mean: is it just? I'm generally libertarian-leaning, but there are obvious cases where the government has a legitimate interest in restricting some speech, and those categories are well-defined (although everyone debates on the margins, all the time).
Whenever this attempt at reductio-ad-absurdem comes up, I find it pretty unconvincing. It's not that they are banning a number, just like if you make certain images illegal you're not banning "light" and if you make slander illegal you're not banning "sound, which is just vibrations in the air." Describing the medium of speech is kind of silly, because the point is the information contained in the media. The fact that the law addresses abstract concepts isn't exactly groundbreaking.
"Information" is simply an abstraction of the physical world.
The physical world that we experience and describe is simply a metaphor on top of that raw data.
Everything is information. How can murder be forbidden? It's just an arrangement of quarks?!
The difference is that Pi is apparently normal, up to all extensive existing evidence. The Universe is not normal. Anyway, Physics doesn't preclude Helms Deep.
I think normalness is a stronger property than "possesses all sequences of the alphabet of its digits", since it means that + "all subsequences are equally likely"
He claims 100% compression, but that clearly disregards the digit ID which is potentially quite large to store. Any idea as to how to compute stats for actual compression (size(content)/size(index))?
Assuming that pi is a normal number [1], its digits are uniformly distributed. Therefore the density of a given binary sequence of length N in pi’s binary expansion is 2^-N.
So on average, the offset for a given binary sequence will be on the order of 2^N (I’ve used some hand-waving here). You need N bits for that, you you’ve gained basically nothing.
Your calculation works backward from already knowing the index.
I assume jgtrosh's question is more of a probability and estimation question. E.g. the string "Hello world" takes up 11 bytes and what's the size of the index into pi? To generalize a little more, to store any 11-byte sequence, what is the estimated size to store its index? To find the exact 256^11 byte sequence in pi, there will be many cases where the sizeof(index) is greater than the data itself.
> He claims 100% compression, but that clearly disregards the digit ID which is potentially quite large to store
That reminds me of a compression program I once wrote. It had the following properties:
1. It accepts any non-empty file other than a file consisting of a single 0 byte.
2. It is easily reversible.
3. The output is never larger than the input.
4. The output is smaller than the input for some files.
5. If a file is larger than 1 byte, iterating enough times will always eventually produce a smaller file. What is "enough times" depends on the file content.
(I wrote this partly as a joke, and partly as a counterexample to some proofs I'd seen on Usenet about the limitations of compression programs where the proofs had not been sufficiently precise in specifying the conditions necessary for them to apply).
It is actually quite simple:
1. If the file is empty or a single byte that is 0, report that the input is not acceptable and exit.
2. If the file is N bytes, treat it as if it is an 8N bit unsigned integer, I.
3. If I is 0, the output file is N-1 bytes all with value 0xFF.
4. If I is not 0, subtract 1, and output the result.
(Decompression is left as an exercise for the reader).
Another way to look at this is to imagine that we have a sorted list of all possible files. The primary sort key is file size. The secondary sort key is the numerical value of the file when treated as an 8N bit unsigned integer, where N is the file size.
My compression algorithm is simply to replace each file with the file immediately ahead of it on that file list.
Viewed that way, it is pretty obvious that all my claims are true. It accepts any non-empty file other than the first file on the list (single 0 byte). To reverse it, replace the input with the file immediately after it from the list. The list is ordered by file size, so stepping down in the list never gives a larger file, and sometimes gives a smaller file. The output file is on the list, so you can obviously iterate.
The catch, of course, is that while yes, you can take your 1 TB of arbitrary data (even true random data!) and apply my algorithm iteratively to get down to, say, a 1 byte file, and yes, you can apply the decompression algorithm iteratively to recover your 1 TB from, to do that you have to know how many times to iterate on the decompression end.
The number of iterations required for an uncompressed file of N bytes to compress down to a byte is on the order of 2^(8N), so you will need about N bytes to store the iteration count.
So net result is that it can replace an N byte file with a 1 byte file...but it is going to drop N bytes of metadata on you that you'll need to store somewhere.
That's not necessarily true and probably is false. What we know about Pi is that it includes an infinite number of elements, but this says nothing about the structure of those elements. An infinitely long random sequence will probably hold every pattern possible (I'm not a mathematician so correct me if I'm wrong) but any structured or repeating sequence doesn't.
> An infinitely long random sequence will probably hold every pattern possible (I'm not a mathematician so correct me if I'm wrong) but any structured or repeating sequence doesn't.
This is not true. Pi is probably irrational, which means we know it doesn't repeat itself. However, it is not proven to be normal, so it's a conjecture (but not fact) that it contains every finite sequence of digits at some point.
Specifically, if pi contains itself, that means "pi - pi/b^k" is a terminating fraction N in base b", where b is your choice of base (like base 10), and k is some positive integer. So
pi = N/(1-b^k) which is rational.
(And if you set k=0, you get that pi "contains itself" in the sense that pi from the 1st digit onward is of course pi)
You’re probably thinking of set theory but the file system is about storing information in a sequence and an offset. Seen that way, π can be stored with offset 0.
If it's normal then it contains all finite strings uniformly in its base-b expansions. Pi is not a finite string so it wouldn't have to contain itself uniformly. More specifically if it contains itself then it's a rational number, but we know that pi is not a rational number. Note that we don't know whether pi is a normal real number.
Undortunately with this solution you’re still storing the same amount of information as you’d normally do. It’s just encoded as offsets into pi’s decimal expansion.
You can’t cheat entropy.
Beware of technology-generated outrage. If you can encode a message, image, etc. as a number, some messages, like a communication of a specific threat against a specific person, or certain types of porn, that's going to result in "illegal numbers." When put that way, the outrage is pretty weak.
It is legitimate and provably effective to legally limit the demand for some items, like ivory, for example, by making it contraband, interdicting trade, and punishing possession.
So what is the outrage actually about? A lot of it is about corporations asserting property rights in publishing and enforcing those supposed rights in ways that result in bad decisions, bad designs, bad products, insecure systems, and bad uses of law enforcement related to computing.
The solution isn't to "make all numbers legal" because that's not the question. The solution is to address the problems in the real world, where they make sense. Limit copyright terms. Limit laws to publisher-scale theft for profit. And that boils down to nerfing corporate money in politics.
>It is legitimate and provably effective to legally limit the demand for some items, like ivory, for example
Whats the proof then? Last I checked, despite all laws, ivory animals are being poached into extinction. It might be more effective than doing something like paying poachers to poach even more animals, but that isn't proof it is an effective means to stopping the problem of poaching animals into extinction.
Ultimately this is totally nonsensical because you'd have to ban an infinite number of number because some clever boy around will definitively distribute the number preceding the illegal one and some unrelated folk can point out that you just have to +1 to get the illegal one. Basically none of the two would have done anything illegal until a ruling. rince, repeat. This is utter non-sense.
It shouldn't be illegal. Possession of information - be it a book, a video, a picture, or text, should never be illegal in itself. Production and distribution of certain kinds should be absolutely illegal, but they already are, I don't think there's any discussion here.
> Possession of information [...] should never be illegal in itself.
It certainly makes for an interesting discussion, however, your view is fringe here -- the laws of virtually every free democracy on the planet encapsulate the idea of some information being illegal.
HOWEVER: the gp point wasn't coming at it from your perspective there. They were saying (as I understood it) the fact that integers are "just numbers" meant that banning them was nonsensical. By extension, the illegality of distributing them would also be nonsensical.
> the laws of virtually every free democracy on the planet encapsulate the idea of some information being illegal.
Illegal to disseminate, not to own. There should be no punishment for being able to access or possessing information; Liability should squarely sit with the publisher, intentional or otherwise.
Most places have indecency laws which cover things like video of murders and extreme pornography; privacy laws that make acquisition and retention of data/imagery illegal; etc..
Absolutely, but to use books as the example here - should we ever send people to jail for owning a book? Like, just sitting in their home library - should you ever go to jail for one? If yes, why yes? If no, what if the book is Mein Kampf? What if it contains graphic descriptions of child rape? What if it contains nuclear codes for US army stockpile? What if it describes how to make bombs and conduct terrorist attacks?
Or maybe....we should look at who is distributing material that we have a problem with, and target it there? As a society we should never be putting people in jail for just owning a certain piece of information, would you not agree?
Incidentally there isn’t a single country (as far as I could find) where owning Mein Kampf is or was illegal. There’s a common misconception that its possession is or was illegal in Germany. However, this was never the case. Until 2016 the state of Bavaria owned the exclusive copyright and prohibited its publication. But that’s it.
I don't see the problem with banning or otherwise regulating certain representations if that is a useful tool against the production you are trying to stop.
This sort of "everything is allowed" arguments just seems like a way to avoid having to think carefully about what restrictions are reasonable, and what constitutes responsible use of information. Simply lazy irresponsibility.
Except it's not "everything is allowed", and the "ban and regulate everything" mentality seems to be more harmful, useless, waste of time and money in reality.
I have commented before about A/B testing the law to achieve statistical outcomes, and I absolutely do see a problem with it. It tosses principles and liberties out the window. Legislating things that are correlated with the thing you want to avoid is a utilitarian bridge too far for me.
So you'll be fine with DUI? After all, it's not the alcohol we're trying to avoid - it's the accidents, which are correlated with alcohol (for obvious reasons).
Truth is, often correlations are the only things we can go after to fight the things we don't want.
Sadly, being silly doesn’t make a law unenforceable (for example, every Witchcraft Act).
There is a lot of content out there which is illegal to possess, not just DMCA circumvention, and thanks to the wonderful power of mathematics that content can always be expressed as a number.
Extending your analogy, you could have a random bit sequence, XOR it with the content and distribute only the random sequence and the XORed sequence, making it a nonce-sense.
Or you could use a public and well-defined bit sequence, such as binary digits of pi, and distribute the XORed sequence.
You might even decline to mention which well-defined bit sequence you used, and just leave it as an exercise for the reader to try XORing with pi, e, phi, sqrt(2), etcetera on their own.
I always felt that that "illegal numbers" is a misunderstanding of data.
There are no illegal numbers. But if you provide context, they can become illegal data. Let's take child pornography for an example, because that's universally accepted as illegal. I could come up with a formula which translates a huge number into a bitmap. I could post the number (i.e. the input for the formula) online, because it is absolutely meaningless to anyone else. But when I publish my formula, it is no longer a number. It's data which can be interpreted as something meaningful, an image.
You can literally arbitrarily associate any number to anything and ban it based on that, which they did:
> In 2012, it was reported that the numbers 89, 6, and 4 each became banned search terms on search engines in China, because of the date (1989-06-04) of the June Fourth Massacre in Tiananmen Square.
> Due to the association with gangs, in 2012 a school district in Colorado banned the wearing of jerseys that bore the numbers 18, 14, or 13 (or the reverse, 81, 41, or 31).
> In 2017, far-right Slovak politician Marian Kotleba was criminally charged for donating 1,488 euro to a charity.
It's closely related to hate speech laws where the only requirement is perceived threat. Fun times. :D
> An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.
Well, I'm not sure it's fair to say the number itself is illegal: it's the code that breaks the law, the number just happens to be one way to express it.
A perfectly equivalent statement is that there are certain "strings that are illegal", but this is both trivially true and a clearly exposes the fallacy at play here.
A written death threat is still a death treat no matter the string encoding you use, so while yes it is an "illegal string", this is just incidental: its the threat that the string encodes that is really breaking the law.
Not really disagreeing with you, but taking it even further:
A "written death threat" is not "illegal". I've seen plenty of such threats written on the boundaries of military sites or even electricity substations. Delivering death threats to a person may constitute illegal harassment, but so might delivering love letters. It all depends on the circumstances.
A warning is not the same thing as the sort of threat you get in trouble for. If the circumstances are 'conflating the meaning of terms' then yes, a lot of things - practically everything - can end up 'illegal'.
Everything is a number. When you think of an illegal media, such as child porn, it is in fact a gigantic number that your computer parses and turns into an array of frames which is an array of Red, Green, Blue values. Since everything can be encoded into numbers, and some things are illegal, trivially some numbers are illegal (in certain contexts).
This was clearly not written by a lawyer. I am also not a lawyer but it's pretty clear that merely distributing this prime number is not illegal. Distributing it with the intent to use it to use it as DeCSS may be though. And it would be pretty hard to convince a judge that you didn't intent to use it as DeCSS.
Supposedly the prosecution - in an English-style law system - has to convince the court beyond reasonable doubt that it was intended to be used for wrong.
It’s illegal because it’s someones job to enforce it, they probably don’t get paid much, and they have many bills to pay. And every now and then they can impress chicks by saying they manage national security. And the department who monitors us for usage of this number using all the latest expensive tech and expertise, can charge it to the tax payer. Just imagine if the number got into the hands of the enemy. ka, ching, that will be another billion dollars for my top secret department thanks very much.
Surely there must be a shorter number or string that I can put in my personal information that would be illegal to copy or store. I am ok with being in trouble for having the data, as long as everyone else with the data is in trouble as well.
So if I surreptitiously install a camera in your house and take pictures or video, then tweak the files so that their binary images denote prime numbers, all is cool; I'm just doing math, not invading your privacy.
Perhaps I shouldn't have said "large" or "notable". The point is that when a prime number is discovered meeting certain criteria it is included in public databases. This makes the case of an "illegal" such prime interesting.
No. Even then they're not notable. For example there are 10^97.6 primes with 100 digits, of which not all have been found (not enough storage space in the universe), but it's trivially easy to generate one at random.
This already exists, it’s called cryptography: for example, you can exchange some prime numbers (key exchange), and then use those to apply a generic mathematical function to the information. You then send the resulting numbers.
(In this situation it isn’t the prime numbers themselves which are illegal, it’s the other numbers.)
No, this is really not similar to cryptography. More like the opposite.
Cryptography is about exchanging secrets on an insecure network.
This is about legally publishing information you're not allowed to make public.
It does change the legal situation because, from the article, it's about
> ... the representation of the illegal code in a form that had an intrinsically archivable quality. (...) The primality of a number is a fundamental property of number theory and is therefore not dependent on legal definitions of any particular jurisdiction.
I remember the news about the example used in the post. This is a proof of a society where 50% loves math and the rest makes money with who loves math.
Call the cops.