3 ms·

"Colour" is just history. Both bits and physical things can have history that isn't recorded in the thing itself, but is relevant to the law. For example, the l

"Colour" is just history. Both bits and physical things can have history that isn't recorded in the thing itself, but is relevant to the law. For example, the law cares if you're driving a stolen car, even though the car's atoms don't carry XML tags saying "stolen". Enforcing rules based on history is hard, both in the physical and digital world, but it's not impossible. It might even be easier in the digital world, due to ubiquitous surveillance and robust content ID algorithms. Pointing to computer science is just a deflection, like a theoretical physicist explaining that protons are indistinguishable when asked about tracking stolen cars. In practice, history can be tracked. The only question is whether we want to.

ouid 10y ago
I don't know what you mean by "in practice", but if everyone in a network is always either uploading encrypted bits or random bits, then the problem of tracking the history of that network reduces, in practice, to the problem of distinguishing between the two.
- tbrownaw 10y ago
  It's not like it's unheard of for people to get arrested for online activity. And from what I understand, those often don't rely on network sniffing. Because somewhere on your abstraction stack, you'll eventually get to things that are human-meaningful information. Things like facebook or backpage posts, credit card transactions, etc. Things that are in various ways tied to identifiable entities that exist in the physical world.
alexvoda 10y ago
There are two points I think you are mistaken on. 1. History in the real world is very much traceable. That's what a paper (celulose or digital) trail is. The history may not be physically attached to the object but the interested parties should have the appropriate property documents. And when there are contradictory claims, documents trump spoken agreements. 2. In the physical world no to objects (above atomical level if you want to be pedantic) are the same and there is a limited supply. In the digital world, a copy is absolutely identical and indistinguishable from its original and from the potential infinity of other copies.

ouid 10y ago

I don't know what you mean by "in practice", but if everyone in a network is always either uploading encrypted bits or random bits, then the problem of tracking the history of that network reduces, in practice, to the problem of distinguishing between the two.

tbrownaw 10y ago
It's not like it's unheard of for people to get arrested for online activity. And from what I understand, those often don't rely on network sniffing. Because somewhere on your abstraction stack, you'll eventually get to things that are human-meaningful information. Things like facebook or backpage posts, credit card transactions, etc. Things that are in various ways tied to identifiable entities that exist in the physical world.

alexvoda 10y ago

There are two points I think you are mistaken on. 1. History in the real world is very much traceable. That's what a paper (celulose or digital) trail is. The history may not be physically attached to the object but the interested parties should have the appropriate property documents. And when there are contradictory claims, documents trump spoken agreements. 2. In the physical world no to objects (above atomical level if you want to be pedantic) are the same and there is a limited supply. In the digital world, a copy is absolutely identical and indistinguishable from its original and from the potential infinity of other copies.