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>Sort of like making a fire is trivial Yes, but demonstrating the practical difficulty in trying to regulate 102-byte sequences that can fit on a T-shirt (or i
by declan 11y ago
>Sort of like making a fire is trivial
Yes, but demonstrating the practical difficulty in trying to regulate 102-byte sequences that can fit on a T-shirt (or in a tweet) has a utility of its own.
It's what Prof. Dave Touretzky did in the case of DeCSS, which got shrunk down to 434 bytes when implemented in C:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
- johansch 11y agoYeah, the same sorta utility it has to demonstrate that it is possible for anyone to create a fire in any publicly accessible location in London, for instance in some very valuable historic building. (No, I am not advocating you do so.) I'm just making the point that you didn't get my point. They don't care about how feasible or trivial something is as long as they can ban the usage of it. In legal terms: all you are doing is irrelevant technical wanking.
- darkmighty 11y agoI think he understands it's possible to ban it, it just won't work for the cases that matter. There's a deeper problem with banning encryption of any form (e.g. "strong encryption") that an encrypted file can be made indistinguishable from random data. If the police or any prosecutor will never be able to tell that a chunk of that was strongly encrypted (technically feasible), the law will never work. And then there's the sheer absurdity of the idea, which the comparison banishing starting fires doesn't capture.
- johansch 11y agoYou are also missing the point. The law mostly cares about intent and the prosecutor (or whatever it is called where you live) being able to convince the jury or judge of what they thought happened. It's not like the sort of logical reasoning that happens when software engineers battle for the Right way to do something. :)
- darkmighty 11y agoNo, I still maintain it can be engineered around. If enough people start random streams between themselves, is the government going to prevent that? Noise actually can be put into anything, it could be images, sound, random.org, whatever. You can then embed crypto in those streams. When the prosecutors can't even distinguish intent then there's a problem. No third party may ever know someone exchanged encrypted messages. So again, I'm not saying the law is fundamentally inconsistent or anything, it's just that it's pretty easy to make it unenforceable and undetectable.
- DanBC 11y ago> Noise actually can be put into anything, it could be images, sound You just massively increased bandwidth cost and download times.
- borkabrak 11y agoIt's about time a Comcast rep showed up here. :-)
- darkmighty 11y agoCryptograms can't be compressed either (so the additional bandwidth requirement can be close to 0).
- DanBC 11y agoNo, you're saying that people should add noise to everything, which steganographically masks the times when they add encrypted data instead. The noise, which is added to everything, is not compressible so now everything takes a lot more badwidth.
- darkmighty 11y agoSee my comment on Generative Models above. In general there are too many degrees of freedom with modern communication channels for concealing data to be an insurmountable challenge, even if you don't have powerful Generative Models. Keep in mind the law is targeting malicious actors, people that would likely try to use this sort of circumvention even if it isn't mainstream.
- declan 11y agoWait, you're calling a DeCSS gallery that has been cited (favorably) in multiple legal briefs and sworn testimony in federal district court "irrelevant technical wanking?" Just wanted to make sure we're talking about the same thing, counselor. :)