5 ms·

I haven't looked for obvious reasons but back in the day people were saying that there was already child porn embedded in bitcoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index

I haven't looked for obvious reasons but back in the day people were saying that there was already child porn embedded in bitcoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671894.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671894.0 Which is why child porn is one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers. That we are trying to apply flesh space laws to bits just goes to show how stupid we still are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime Until we change the laws we have to meet the needs of digital computers instead of the printing press we will have these ridiculous ways of attacking useful new technology.

Tomte 9y ago
I have no need to legalize child porn just because you think it's necessary for "computers".
- zeth___ 9y ago
  You already have hundreds of gigabytes of child porn on your computer. What you lack is a program to decode them consistently (I hope). You can read digital information in any way you please. An image is fundamentally two numbers that give you the height and width and a bunch of number triplets that give you the color values for the pixels inside. You can always find a transformation from any number to any image given you allow the transformation function to be odd enough. To put it simply, you sound like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g When trying to outlaw some numbers in some situations.
  - Tomte 9y ago
    You're so clever! If only anyone had ever thought of it. He could then have written "What Colour are your bits?".
    - zeth___ 9y ago
      You are extremely hostile and unhelpful in this discussion. If you want to drag discourse down there are a lot of other forums where one line replies signaling you know something profound without actually saying anything are acceptable. HN is not one of these.
      - Tomte 9y ago
        You should simply read the essay and educate yourself. Obviously you won't, but don't act so high and mighty. Especially since "illegal numbers" has been the standard argument of people with lots of opinion and little knowledge. BTW, massively editing and expanding your comment after a reply without any notice is shady.
        zeth___ 9y ago
        You are continuing to be hostile. I have read the paper, years ago. His point about 'colour of bits' is conflating a number of different ideas. A chain of trust and intent for starters. A chain of trust is a trivially easy thing to solve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_trust Asking that bits meet some simple predefined function isn't hard. In his example simply demanding that along with the substance you are provided a signed copy of the ph value would mean that bits without color give us all the information we need, given the physical limitations of the universe as we understand it. Intent isn't. But intent has nothing to do with the bits either. Which has been my point from the start: no digital information should be a priori illegal. On the edit: I finished it before your post. I'm not sure how long a line took to write, but I suspect it was way less than the time needed to refresh the thread.
        Tomte 9y ago
        You're hostile and not discussing in good faith. Please leave HN.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - jerf 9y ago
    Using logic similar to chapter six of https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf , though, you can still draw a meaningful distinction between a normal JPG decoder, and your proposed JPG decoder that interprets the Declaration of Independence as illegal child porn. Your decoder must inevitably have a much higher information content in it, and is a "reduction doing all the work" in that case. So while you've got a mathematical point (no sarcasm, I understand what you are getting at), even on purely mathematical grounds I can argue a meaningful distinction; legally it'll be even easier. Interestingly, it's a distinction that happens to more-or-less match our own intuitions about the situation, which is something interesting to ruminate about a bit.
- gambiting 9y ago
  I know it's controversial, but I think simply having any information should never be illegal - be it a manual on building bombs, detailed plans of the white house or yes, child porn. Obviously production of such material should be completely 10000% illegal, but we already have laws that cover this extensively. But simply having a written text, drawn picture, photograph or a video should never be illegal in itself.
  - mcny 9y ago
    > But simply having a written text, drawn picture, photograph or a video should never be illegal in itself. Exactly! However, reality is very sad. A map could potentially get you in prison in India https://archive.fo/nLtJX https://archive.fo/nLtJX > The draft bill says: “No person shall depict, disseminate, publish or distribute any wrong or false topographic information of India including international boundaries through internet platforms or online services in any electronic or physical form.” The maximum penalty for wrongly depicting the map will be a fine of Rs1bn ($15m) and imprisonment for up to seven years.
    - ianai 9y ago
      I wonder if they had scams around that somewhere/time.
      - thatcat 9y ago
        It's probably due to border disputes with China.
    - nradov 9y ago
      India has active border disputes with both Pakistan and China. The concern is that if an Indian publisher produces maps which don't show the disputed areas as part of India then that would hurt their legal case in international tribunals and hand a propaganda victory to the other side. Land is the foundation of the state so it's not surprising that some governments react harshly to something their leaders perceive as an existential threat.
  - 9y ago
- userbinator 9y ago
  Digital depictions of illegal acts in real life should remain legal, and illegal acts in real life should also remain illegal. I think that's the best way to resolve this.
  - lolc 9y ago
    What if one's classmates trade photographs of one getting raped? Maybe you would accept this based on your principles. But do you also demand that everybody else accepts this? Maybe the act in itself wasn't even illegal. But publication may still be. I can have your consent to record, but not to publish. Should we just accept that the publication was illegal, but once-breached, further publication is legal? So if I want to air something, I publish it anonymously and can then freely refer to it? A lot of laws would have to be rewritten for this to work. Privacy laws and copyright laws among them.
dpwm 9y ago
I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised. This seems a really difficult area that's almost incompatible with the way we do criminal law, because intent and knowledge are so hard to prove either way. Even where there's plenty of circumstantial evidence of intent it is not going to prove it either way. You could plan to murder somebody for years, leave an evidence trail and then run them over by complete accident. Should that be premeditated murder or manslaughter? In the eyes of a jury it will almost certainly be premeditated murder. You could black out at the wheel and for a while have no knowledge that you have killed. From the philosophical perspective the lines are blurry: Only the individual can actually know, and given the amount to which people can self-delude themselves, even that isn't guaranteed. Juries do not make decisions on reasonable doubt, and often default to balance of probabilities. Depending on the jurisdiction, when a unanimous verdict cannot be determined a majority one is accepted. Let's say I have a HDD I write random data to as a block device. What are the implications for me in twenty years if somebody creates an image file format that can decompress some of the linear subregions of my random HDD data. I haven't the time now to do anything but a very simple analysis of this. Intuitively this depends on the size of the drive and the size of the compressed file. Let's say for arguments sake it can encode a prohibited piece of data in 10kB. At what point of completely random storage material are you likely to have a forbidden piece of data? Well, each terrabyte contains approximately 1e12 such linear subsequences. And we need 1e3010 such subsequences to match a forbidden sequence. So that's 1e2998 or so TB if there is only one forbidden piece of data. With more I think the birthday paradox kicks in. Now if we can encode the forbidden data in 8 bytes or such then we reach the problem much sooner. I doubt that will happen somehow.
- zeth___ 9y ago
  >I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised. No I am making the very simple case that a number is a number and you can't make a number illegal. All digital information is numbers and banning any of the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse at mere possession will ensure we retard most useful technologies. The only time that flesh space laws should apply is when flesh space actions are taken. An example: terrorist training material is sent on how to build a bomb. Until a bomb is built, or a conspiracy to build a bomb is made, nothing illegal should have happened.
amelius 9y ago
Note that we only need one number to capture all possible finite content (i.e., the number is chosen such that all binary strings will appear somewhere in the binary representation of the number). A "normal number" [1] satisfies this property. And it is believed that Pi is a normal number. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
- woah 9y ago
  I’ve actually written a book on this topic: π
  - amelius 9y ago
    Can I have 1 cent for every spelling mistake I find in your book? ;)

Tomte 9y ago

I have no need to legalize child porn just because you think it's necessary for "computers".

zeth___ 9y ago
You already have hundreds of gigabytes of child porn on your computer. What you lack is a program to decode them consistently (I hope). You can read digital information in any way you please. An image is fundamentally two numbers that give you the height and width and a bunch of number triplets that give you the color values for the pixels inside. You can always find a transformation from any number to any image given you allow the transformation function to be odd enough. To put it simply, you sound like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g When trying to outlaw some numbers in some situations.
- Tomte 9y ago
  You're so clever! If only anyone had ever thought of it. He could then have written "What Colour are your bits?".
  - zeth___ 9y ago
    You are extremely hostile and unhelpful in this discussion. If you want to drag discourse down there are a lot of other forums where one line replies signaling you know something profound without actually saying anything are acceptable. HN is not one of these.
    - Tomte 9y ago
      You should simply read the essay and educate yourself. Obviously you won't, but don't act so high and mighty. Especially since "illegal numbers" has been the standard argument of people with lots of opinion and little knowledge. BTW, massively editing and expanding your comment after a reply without any notice is shady.
      - zeth___ 9y ago
        You are continuing to be hostile. I have read the paper, years ago. His point about 'colour of bits' is conflating a number of different ideas. A chain of trust and intent for starters. A chain of trust is a trivially easy thing to solve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_trust Asking that bits meet some simple predefined function isn't hard. In his example simply demanding that along with the substance you are provided a signed copy of the ph value would mean that bits without color give us all the information we need, given the physical limitations of the universe as we understand it. Intent isn't. But intent has nothing to do with the bits either. Which has been my point from the start: no digital information should be a priori illegal. On the edit: I finished it before your post. I'm not sure how long a line took to write, but I suspect it was way less than the time needed to refresh the thread.
        Tomte 9y ago
        You're hostile and not discussing in good faith. Please leave HN.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- jerf 9y ago
  Using logic similar to chapter six of https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf , though, you can still draw a meaningful distinction between a normal JPG decoder, and your proposed JPG decoder that interprets the Declaration of Independence as illegal child porn. Your decoder must inevitably have a much higher information content in it, and is a "reduction doing all the work" in that case. So while you've got a mathematical point (no sarcasm, I understand what you are getting at), even on purely mathematical grounds I can argue a meaningful distinction; legally it'll be even easier. Interestingly, it's a distinction that happens to more-or-less match our own intuitions about the situation, which is something interesting to ruminate about a bit.
gambiting 9y ago
I know it's controversial, but I think simply having any information should never be illegal - be it a manual on building bombs, detailed plans of the white house or yes, child porn. Obviously production of such material should be completely 10000% illegal, but we already have laws that cover this extensively. But simply having a written text, drawn picture, photograph or a video should never be illegal in itself.
- mcny 9y ago
  > But simply having a written text, drawn picture, photograph or a video should never be illegal in itself. Exactly! However, reality is very sad. A map could potentially get you in prison in India https://archive.fo/nLtJX https://archive.fo/nLtJX > The draft bill says: “No person shall depict, disseminate, publish or distribute any wrong or false topographic information of India including international boundaries through internet platforms or online services in any electronic or physical form.” The maximum penalty for wrongly depicting the map will be a fine of Rs1bn ($15m) and imprisonment for up to seven years.
  - ianai 9y ago
    I wonder if they had scams around that somewhere/time.
    - thatcat 9y ago
      It's probably due to border disputes with China.
  - nradov 9y ago
    India has active border disputes with both Pakistan and China. The concern is that if an Indian publisher produces maps which don't show the disputed areas as part of India then that would hurt their legal case in international tribunals and hand a propaganda victory to the other side. Land is the foundation of the state so it's not surprising that some governments react harshly to something their leaders perceive as an existential threat.
- 9y ago
userbinator 9y ago
Digital depictions of illegal acts in real life should remain legal, and illegal acts in real life should also remain illegal. I think that's the best way to resolve this.
- lolc 9y ago
  What if one's classmates trade photographs of one getting raped? Maybe you would accept this based on your principles. But do you also demand that everybody else accepts this? Maybe the act in itself wasn't even illegal. But publication may still be. I can have your consent to record, but not to publish. Should we just accept that the publication was illegal, but once-breached, further publication is legal? So if I want to air something, I publish it anonymously and can then freely refer to it? A lot of laws would have to be rewritten for this to work. Privacy laws and copyright laws among them.

dpwm 9y ago

I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised. This seems a really difficult area that's almost incompatible with the way we do criminal law, because intent and knowledge are so hard to prove either way. Even where there's plenty of circumstantial evidence of intent it is not going to prove it either way. You could plan to murder somebody for years, leave an evidence trail and then run them over by complete accident. Should that be premeditated murder or manslaughter? In the eyes of a jury it will almost certainly be premeditated murder. You could black out at the wheel and for a while have no knowledge that you have killed. From the philosophical perspective the lines are blurry: Only the individual can actually know, and given the amount to which people can self-delude themselves, even that isn't guaranteed. Juries do not make decisions on reasonable doubt, and often default to balance of probabilities. Depending on the jurisdiction, when a unanimous verdict cannot be determined a majority one is accepted. Let's say I have a HDD I write random data to as a block device. What are the implications for me in twenty years if somebody creates an image file format that can decompress some of the linear subregions of my random HDD data. I haven't the time now to do anything but a very simple analysis of this. Intuitively this depends on the size of the drive and the size of the compressed file. Let's say for arguments sake it can encode a prohibited piece of data in 10kB. At what point of completely random storage material are you likely to have a forbidden piece of data? Well, each terrabyte contains approximately 1e12 such linear subsequences. And we need 1e3010 such subsequences to match a forbidden sequence. So that's 1e2998 or so TB if there is only one forbidden piece of data. With more I think the birthday paradox kicks in. Now if we can encode the forbidden data in 8 bytes or such then we reach the problem much sooner. I doubt that will happen somehow.

zeth___ 9y ago
>I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised. No I am making the very simple case that a number is a number and you can't make a number illegal. All digital information is numbers and banning any of the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse at mere possession will ensure we retard most useful technologies. The only time that flesh space laws should apply is when flesh space actions are taken. An example: terrorist training material is sent on how to build a bomb. Until a bomb is built, or a conspiracy to build a bomb is made, nothing illegal should have happened.

amelius 9y ago

Note that we only need one number to capture all possible finite content (i.e., the number is chosen such that all binary strings will appear somewhere in the binary representation of the number). A "normal number" [1] satisfies this property. And it is believed that Pi is a normal number. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

woah 9y ago
I’ve actually written a book on this topic: π
- amelius 9y ago
  Can I have 1 cent for every spelling mistake I find in your book? ;)