3 ms·

Does it also strike you as strange that it can be illegal to make certain cuts on a piece of metal? (e.g. machine gun manufacture laws that exist on nearly eve

• colejohnson66 8y ago
  > I find that these kind of reductive arguments floated for digital subjects fall apart when you remove the computer from the equation. The “illegal numbers” concept is something I find interesting. Just because a certain number can be used to decrypt BluRays, it’s illegal
  • dTal 8y ago
    That only seems odd because it's a flawed intuition pump: a "number" feels like a small, innocent, abstract and singular thing, while "data" feels large and complex and rich with potential. But a "number" can be any size. A dump of Wikipedia is a "number". All information, and hence all secrets, are "numbers". The notion of an "illegal number" is just a weird way of phrasing the idea of government-enforced secrecy. 128 bits is about the threshold where a "number" stops behaving like our intuition of a number, and starts being rare enough that you won't arrive at an "illegal" number by counting or chance, i.e. it is now a "file" for all practical purposes: https://qntm.org/number https://qntm.org/number
• huffmsa 8y ago
  Yes actually I do think they're ridiculous for physical things too. I take a pretty libertarian lean on most things.