Summary: "Illegal number" is a term that you use to refer to protected digital information when you also want to convey that you have no grasp of the legal issues involved.
Let's have a thread about it then. What legal issues am I misunderstanding? It seems to me that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are rather unprecedented.
Brandenburg v. Ohio demonstrated that free speech protects abstract advocacy of force or law violation. The anti-circumvention provisions criminalize the distribution of not just software that can be directly used, but anything that serves as a tool to violate copyright. That could be a small number, a key, or even a description of how a DRM scheme operates.
I cannot imagine a constitutional basis for those provisions of the DMCA. What say you?
> The anti-circumvention provisions criminalize the distribution of not just software that can be directly used, but anything that serves as a tool to violate copyright.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm going to speculate that if you upload image.bmp, a picture you took with your camera, that happens by coincidence to contain a key that can be used for circumvention, then you would not be prosecuted or convicted. In other words, it's not the number that's illegal.
I'm not speaking about accidental violation of the provision, I'm even talking about intentional violation. Anti-circumvention provisions don't cover the copyrighted work, they don't even cover a derivative work. It's just suppression of speech that tangentially supports or encourages illegal activities, which the Supreme Court has ruled the government has no compelling interest in quelling.
A lot of this speech can take many forms. It can be blog posts delving into how some encryption scheme works, it can be keys that are derived mathematically from Sony's mistakes, and it can be software which may only incidentally be used as a tool to circumvent DRM. This does not survive strict scrutiny.
I would argue that a secret key by itself does not qualify as a circumvention tool and thus should not be banned by the DMCA. Unfortunately, by my reading the law does not agree with me and specifically bans distribution of a circumvention "device, component, or part thereof"; it seems like a key is a part of a circumvention device.
Looking at circumvention code itself, I would argue that such code should have no artistic or political expression when boiled down to its functional essence, in which case there is no meaningful free speech issue. If the code did have artistic or political aspects, arguably those aspects could be separated from the part of the code which performs circumvention. For example, the political opinion of being opposed to the DMCA can be easily expressed without using any code.
Having read the article, I'm not sure if this summary is satirical or not. On the one hand, it sounds like it could be a relevant summary of his point, on the other hand it sounds like you're saying the author has no grasp of the legal issues involved.
It sounds to me like he's saying that the author of the "Illegal number" article has no grasp of the legal (or philosophical) issues involved, not that the author of the "What color are your bits?" article has no grasp of it.
The author of that article specifically made a point of not calling either side "right" or "wrong"; the article just exists to help both sides understand the worldview of the other. Whichever mindset you hold, understanding the other mindset will help you make more effective arguments that don't sound inherently insane.
From the perspective of the law, bits do have color, even though that makes no sense from a technical perspective. So, any given number may or may not qualify as "illegal" depending on how you generated it. That said, I don't think that makes the terms "illegal number" or "illegal prime" nonsensical, depending on context.
In any case, I think the article doesn't deserve the pithy "summary" upthread; the summary provides actively unhelpful information if you haven't read the article.
My summary was snarky, but "illegal number" is a silly term intended to emphasize that "it's just a number (so how could it be illegal?)", which is as sophisticated as the legal arguments "it's just a plastic disk with certain reflective properties" or "it's just some markings on a piece of paper."
Your claim that bits having color "makes no sense from a technical perspective" sounds like more geek misunderstanding to me. There is no technical problem here -- only a problem of geeks applying technical results where they shouldn't.