31 ms·
Illegal prime
- bambax 8y agoThis could be used to circumvent other (all?) limitations of speech. Just say "look up the nth prime and unzip it" instead of what you can't say... There should be a whole industry about it.
- esquivalience 8y agoIt's not less unlawful just because you express it in a number - just harder to catch. Surely there are easier ways to circumvent?
- dmurray 8y agoCalculating the nth prime is hard, but you may be interested in πfs, a system for storing and retrieving your data based only on the digits of pi. https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- throwaway080383 8y agoExpressing n is as hard as expressing the original data.
- klmr 8y agoThis 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.) Doesn’t change the legal situation, of course.
- bambax 8y agoNo, 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.
- Twisell 8y agoUltimately 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.
- peteretep 8y ago> This is utter non-sense All current computer media can be represented as an integer. You're suggesting that no media is illegal?
- gambiting 8y agoIt 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.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoI 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.
- GyYZTfWBfQw 8y agoExcept 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. Regarding responsibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933814
- 8y ago
- roystonvassey 8y agoThis was an illuminating read. I was not at all aware that there are certain numbers(!) that are illegal. Thanks for sharing
- SiempreViernes 8y agoWell, 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.
- bloak 8y agoNot 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoIn much the same way that the word “fire” itself is not illegal, but shouting it in a crowded theatre may be.
- logfromblammo 8y agoNo. Ken "Popehat" White wants you to read this: https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/ https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha... Please use different phrasing to discuss lawful and unlawful speech in the future.
- 8y ago
- qz3 8y agoI 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. Everything is just a number without context.
- GyYZTfWBfQw 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number :> 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
- logfromblammo 8y agoThat's why the Tiananmen Square Maassacre anniversary date is commonly referred to as "May 35th". Banning specific representations of an idea is a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as you ban one symbolic representation, a new one will be created.
- gowld 8y agoThe Chinese government isn't stupid. They do what they do because it works. Even the opposition agrees with this, hence the term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect The website dedicated to the topic of the OP article is even called... http://chillingeffects.org/ http://chillingeffects.org/ (since renamed to https://lumendatabase.org/ https://lumendatabase.org/ )
- ktpsns 8y agoAs 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?
- vbezhenar 8y agoInformation can be used as a weapon. Government wants to control weapons and forbid it sometimes. I think that's an obvious answer.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- time0ut 8y agoI don't think it's a question of their reason but a question of feasibility.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoHey, 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.
- GyYZTfWBfQw 8y agoYeah, 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?
- _jomo 8y agoAs pi is infinite, it also stores any imaginable information. Someone actually went ahead and implemented a file system based on this idea: https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- misja111 8y agoThis is brilliant, thank you! edit: am I the only one who thinks that this whole pifs filesystem was meant as a joke?
- petters 8y agoEveryone knows it is a joke.
- amelius 8y ago> As pi is infinite, it also stores any imaginable information. Whether that is true is related to the normalness [1] of the number pi, but this property has not been proven. See also: [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number [2] http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/11/since-pi-is-infinite-can-i-draw-any-random-number-sequence-and-be-certain-that-it-exists-somewhere-in-the-digits-of-pi/ http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/11/since-pi-is-infinit...
- andrepd 8y agoI 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"
- mkirklions 8y agoThat was a fun read. Ive always thought about this when people say 'THE UNIVERSE IS INFINITE SO WE ARE EATING DINNER AT HELMS DEEP SOMEWHERE'. Naw man, physics still apply, you dont get gandalf just because you went a few million light years toward Andromedia
- ByThyGrace 8y agoIs it of any particular relevance that such a number is a prime?
- letsgetphysITal 8y agoLarge prime numbers are crucial for public key cryptography to function.
- nicky0 8y agoA large prime is notable and hence is included in public databases.
- OscarCunningham 8y agoThat's not really true. There are loads of large primes (way more than you could store), so they're not all notable.
- paulgb 8y agoThere are infinite prime numbers. What's notable is the ones we have found.
- OscarCunningham 8y agoNo. 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.
- gowld 8y agoFound the Wikipedia Deletionist.
- OscarCunningham 8y ago
- IshKebab 8y agoThis 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.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoSupposedly 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.
- gowld 8y agoI don't know about DeCSS in particular, but plenty of laws are strict liability meaning intent is not required to obtain a conviction. > And it would be pretty hard to convince a judge that you didn't intent to use it as DeCSS. so "merely distributing this prime number is not illegal" is de facto illegal.
- mcs_ 8y agoI 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.
- jameshart 8y agoseems, from the comments, like it’s time for another generation of developers to read What Colour Are Your Bits: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- TeMPOraL 8y agoCame 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.
- ealhad 8y agoWell thank you, that was a really good read. And so seems to be the rest of the author’s work!
- lambda 8y agoOoh, got to love any article about intellectual property that starts with a analogy to the game Paranoia.
- rayiner 8y agoThe 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.
- 8y ago
- sbhn 8y agoIt’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.
- Zigurd 8y agoBeware 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.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago>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.
- GyYZTfWBfQw 8y agoHahahahaha. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number > 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pxmpxm 8y agoThis 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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoExcellent 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?
- JoBrad 8y agoContext 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.
- closeparen 8y agoSSNs 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.
- JoBrad 8y agoI thought my second sentence addressed this.
- JadeNB 8y ago
- smolsky 8y agoSo, is this the right thread to mention the honorable First Prime of Apophis? He did a few illegal things...
- kazinator 8y agoSo 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.
- calibas 8y ago485650789657397829309841894694286137707442087351357924019652073668698513401047237446968797439926117510973777701027447528049058831384037549709987909653955227011712157025974666993240226834596619606034851742497735846851885567457025712547499964821941846557100841190862597169479707991520048667099759235960613207259737979936188606316914473588300245336972781813914797955513399949394882899846917836100182597890103160196183503434489568705384520853804584241565482488933380474758711283395989685223254460840897111977127694120795862440547161321005006459820176961771809478113622002723448272249323259547234688002927776497906148129840428345720146348968547169082354737835661972186224969431622716663939055430241564732924855248991225739466548627140482117138124388217717602984125524464744505583462814488335631902725319590439283873764073916891257924055015620889787163375999107887084908159097548019285768451988596305323823490558092032999603234471140776019847163531161713078576084862236370283570104961259568184678596533310077017991614674472549272833486916000647585917462781212690073518309241530106302893295665843662000800476778967984382090797619859493646309380586336721469695975027968771205724996666980561453382074120315933770309949152746918356593762102220068126798273445760938020304479122774980917955938387121000588766689258448700470772552497060444652127130404321182610103591186476662963858495087448497373476861420880529443 Call the cops.
- GyYZTfWBfQw 8y agoWatch out, you might get flagged for suggesting that arbitrary laws are ridiculous! At least your tone is great, your hair is not red, etc. all that are completely irrelevant to the content yet manage to get down-votes and get flagged. I bet you if I have phrased my sentences to be more appealing to sensitive people, they wouldn't be hidden now. I guess warnings don't work either, hence proving my point. It's fascinating how deluded people are. Aaaaaaand my comment has been flagged. This is beautiful. :D
- olavk 8y agoPlain 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.
- LinuxBender 8y agoSurely 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.