10 ms·

Illegal Numbers

184 points by Pwnguinz 14y ago

FlukeATX 14y ago
The often relevant "What Colour are your bits?" - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- shasta 14y ago
  Summary: "Illegal number" is a term that you use to refer to protected digital information when you also want to convey that you have no grasp of the legal issues involved.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    Having read the article, I'm not sure if this summary is satirical or not. On the one hand, it sounds like it could be a relevant summary of his point, on the other hand it sounds like you're saying the author has no grasp of the legal issues involved. Can you clarify?
    - JoshTriplett 14y ago
      The author of that article specifically made a point of not calling either side "right" or "wrong"; the article just exists to help both sides understand the worldview of the other. Whichever mindset you hold, understanding the other mindset will help you make more effective arguments that don't sound inherently insane.
      - unimpressive 14y ago
        I'm aware, but the grandparent wrote a "summary" that could be read as either: His point, worded a little oddly. "The author got the law side wrong, and is yet another stupid nerd who doesn't get it."
        JoshTriplett 14y ago
        From the perspective of the law, bits do have color, even though that makes no sense from a technical perspective. So, any given number may or may not qualify as "illegal" depending on how you generated it. That said, I don't think that makes the terms "illegal number" or "illegal prime" nonsensical, depending on context. In any case, I think the article doesn't deserve the pithy "summary" upthread; the summary provides actively unhelpful information if you haven't read the article.
        shasta 14y ago
        My summary was snarky, but "illegal number" is a silly term intended to emphasize that "it's just a number (so how could it be illegal?)", which is as sophisticated as the legal arguments "it's just a plastic disk with certain reflective properties" or "it's just some markings on a piece of paper." Your claim that bits having color "makes no sense from a technical perspective" sounds like more geek misunderstanding to me. There is no technical problem here -- only a problem of geeks applying technical results where they shouldn't.
        JoshTriplett 14y ago
        You've described one side of the debate, yes. The technical side has no less merit; don't dismiss it offhandedly. Hence why I find the essay on bits having color so useful: it frames the debate nicely without actually taking a side. The arguments you referenced would indeed make for relatively unsophisticated legal arguments, but they don't claim to be legal arguments; they're statements about technology and about how geeks want technology to work. They carry no less weight than statements about how lawyers want technology to work. Or, to put it more snarkily: your claim that bits have some unrepresentable property of "color" sounds like non-geek misunderstanding to me. There is no legal problem here -- only a problem of non-geeks applying legalistic results where they shouldn't. :) Let's not rehash the arguments that the essay already eloquently expresses; neither of us will get anywhere that way.
        shasta 14y ago
    - geofft 14y ago
      It sounds to me like he's saying that the author of the "Illegal number" article has no grasp of the legal (or philosophical) issues involved, not that the author of the "What color are your bits?" article has no grasp of it.
  - ewillbefull 14y ago
    > you have no grasp of the legal issues involved Let's have a thread about it then. What legal issues am I misunderstanding? It seems to me that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are rather unprecedented. Brandenburg v. Ohio demonstrated that free speech protects abstract advocacy of force or law violation. The anti-circumvention provisions criminalize the distribution of not just software that can be directly used, but anything that serves as a tool to violate copyright. That could be a small number, a key, or even a description of how a DRM scheme operates. I cannot imagine a constitutional basis for those provisions of the DMCA. What say you?
    - wmf 14y ago
      A non-lawyerly devil's advocate: I would argue that a secret key by itself does not qualify as a circumvention tool and thus should not be banned by the DMCA. Unfortunately, by my reading the law does not agree with me and specifically bans distribution of a circumvention "device, component, or part thereof"; it seems like a key is a part of a circumvention device. Looking at circumvention code itself, I would argue that such code should have no artistic or political expression when boiled down to its functional essence, in which case there is no meaningful free speech issue. If the code did have artistic or political aspects, arguably those aspects could be separated from the part of the code which performs circumvention. For example, the political opinion of being opposed to the DMCA can be easily expressed without using any code.
    - Natsu 14y ago
      The courts seem to put copyright on a roughly equal level with the first amendment, so any censorship caused by them is considered to be by design. http://gigaom.com/2012/07/30/censorship-ok-to-fight-copyright-infringement-but-not-sex-abuse/ http://gigaom.com/2012/07/30/censorship-ok-to-fight-copyrigh...
    - shasta 14y ago
      > The anti-circumvention provisions criminalize the distribution of not just software that can be directly used, but anything that serves as a tool to violate copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm going to speculate that if you upload image.bmp, a picture you took with your camera, that happens by coincidence to contain a key that can be used for circumvention, then you would not be prosecuted or convicted. In other words, it's not the number that's illegal.
tshtf 14y ago
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
baaksies 14y ago
Numbers corresponding to obscenity depends entirely on the software that interprets and renders them, doesn't it? If I write software that translates the number 5 into obscenity, would 5 become illegal?
- Evbn 14y ago
  Not entirely, partially. If you could come up with an actual example, you may have a point.
jorts 14y ago
The first thing that comes to mind when looking at the flag are Windows 8 theme colors.
takluyver 14y ago
I'm intrigued by how the law would handle one time pad cryptography in such a case. You could produce two numbers of similar length, each on its own bearing no relationship to the 'illegal' number, but which can be combined to give that number. Then post them separately. Could either of them legally be taken down?
- esrauch 14y ago
  I believe they would both be infringing. The issue here is intent, and the intent of those two numbers are both to be used to recreate the original number. It's not any different than if one website had the first half and another had the second half. The alternative here would be if you could somehow find preexisting content whose intent was not to recreate this number. In that case it's trivial that the only infringing content would be something that told you how to recreate it based on those (eg if you just have a website for each digit that is trivially noninfringing, but a website that links to each of those websites in the correct order is infringing). It's easy to act like this is absurd because of the natural existing of numbers, but the law is generally pragrmatic and not concerned with extreme hypotheticals. You could similarly argue (and plenty have on internet forums) that every mp3 in existence could be found encoded somewhere in pi, which is technically true but absolutely irrelevant in copyright law; if you encode someones content in a novel encoding it's still infringing the other ephemeral protected content.
- derekp7 14y ago
  The only way to produce such a pair of numbers is by using the restricted material as a source -- therefore the numbers would be a derivative work. This is already covered under copyright law. Now there is a twist to this concept -- plausible deny-ability. Let's say Bob posts a non-infringing work encrypted with a one time pad (randomly generated), and also posts the one time pad too. Both files would appear to be random text until put together. Further, someone else, Bill, produces a "random" number by XORing the Bob's one-time pad with an infringing work, and uses the result as a one-time pad to encrypt another non-infringing work, and posts both of those files. The two one-time pads can recreate the infringing work by XORing them together. But you can't prove who's "random" file was actually randomly created, and which one was produced as a derivative work. Who do you send the take-down notice to?
cletus 14y ago
This is an interesting problem that we, as a society, need to deal with. HN's readership would be predominantly from a tech background with probably a reasonable basis in mathematics and the sciences. As such we can recognize some of the absurdities of the legal system, like how you can't patent a mathematical formula but you can patent software, which is ultimately indistinguishable from a formula in many (if not all?) cases. The question is naturally asked: if I make some number produce something illegal is that number then illegal? The engineers among us like absolute rules and certainty as a general rule. I've had a discussion with someone else about how a group of people could route each other's packets and then hypothetically law enforcement couldn't prove who they came from. The same argument comes up with "an IP address is not a person" arguments. While I sympathize with these arguments, this isn't how the legal system works. The law doesn't work on absolutely provable certainty. It works on reasonable doubt, intent and (hopefully) facts. So when it comes to numbers, one has to remember that numbers encode information (See [1]). So for a small integer to encode, say, an obscene image or a program that circumvents copy protection, it would require another program that actually does that. So if the number 7 produced a DeCSS circumvention program with a given program A, then program A is the problem, not the number 7. Now to turn any number into a video or a program or an image requires another program or infrastructure. Even if it's juaw the raw bytes of an i386/ELF program, you still need a kernel and a filesystem to run it. The test here, as I imagine the law would apply (IANAL), is whether the required infrastructure is general purpose or not. Turning the number 7 into something obscene can't be done with something general purpose. Turning a 1400 digit number into a program can. I don't like the stance of the US on IP, particularly the Obama administration, which has to be the most pro-IP anti-tech administration in US history (IMHO). I also don't like how selective enforcement is here. Share a few songs on Limewire and you'd up for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Really? At the same time, every city has a place you can go to buy pirate DVDs or counterfeit goods (eg Canal St in NYC). Why is this, which is actual trafficking for profit, ignored while the administration tries to elevate file-sharing to terrorism (the original ACTA draft)? Anyway, numbers are simply a way to represent information and that information is the problem, not the number. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
KalobT 14y ago
I don't speak binary very well, so correct me if I'm wrong on this subject. If a number that represents illegal information is formed, that number is illegal. What if there is a larger number that has the illegal number in it? Example: 10 is illegal. 1000 has the number ten in it. The "10" can be filtered out.. How would this be handled?
- Fargren 14y ago
  What truly matter is intent. If you are trying to convey the illegal number, you are trying to break the law. If you accidentally transmit the bits that form the number while transmitting something else, you are not culpable. Obligatory IANAL.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  You are recognizing just one aspect of the inanity that is having "illegal" numbers.
rachelbythebay 14y ago
Sometimes when I'm feeling innocent and pure, I like to pretend that the world is a place where everyone realizes that "... everything is just zeroes and ones" and thus anything can represent anything else when viewed just the right way. That means everything is illegal, and so nothing is illegal. "This coke can plays the melody to Funkytown!" ... http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/26/encoding/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/26/encoding/ Then I snap out of it. It's right up there with "what if each of your fingernails contained a universe" talk: inevitable, but predictable.
rolux 14y ago
The main problem with "illegal numbers" seems to be that for any illegal number a, which represents someone's intellectual property or trade secret A, I can easily create two original pieces of intellectual property B and C so that b + c = a.
- 001sky 14y ago
  This is a good point, as it the derivative notion: are my thoughts about illegal numbers, themselves, illegal. Evidentiary issues aside. etc.
- wmf 14y ago
  This is covered in "color", already posted in this thread.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Give us an actual example of b and c that are created without knowledge of a, and you may have case. But information theory says it is unlikely, if a is deeply original and not derivative of something like b and c to begin with.
  - aes256 14y ago
    I may not be on the same wavelength as rolux here, but compression would be one example. Create B (a series of compressed files) and C (a decompressor), both unique creations in their own right, that when combined create the original work of another person, A. Now I'm no expert on compression, but there are surely a vast, if not infinite, number of possible pairs B and C that could combine to form the original copyrighted work. Thus, with copyright law in its current state, we are not simply granting copyright holders the exclusive rights to a particular sequencing of 1s and 0s, but also rights over any method of creating that sequence. If there are an infinite number of methods of creating that sequence — that is to say, any B, if combined with a suitable C could form A — then aren't we in effect granting rights over everything to the copyright holder? Where do we draw the line? The 1s and 0s that make up this post could, with suitable decompression, form an exact copy of a hit blockbuster, but neither this post nor the decompressor would resemble the blockbuster on their own. Edit: Interesting idea time. If I uploaded a series of files alleging they are encrypted copies of blockbuster films, but resolved not to release the encryption keys to any of the files for 12 months, would the copyright holders have the right to have the encrypted files taken down in the meantime? They can't actually prove that the files are infringing without the encryption key. Is the mere suggestion that a file may potentially, with some manipulation (i.e. decryption with the appropriate key), resemble a copyrighted work, sufficient to have it taken down?
rayiner 14y ago
There is a Latin term for arguments based on the reduction of software to numbers: reductio ad absurdum.
- cbr 14y ago
  You seem to be implying that the argument is absurd, but reductio ad absurdum is valid. "If X were true then we would have impossibility Y, so X must be false."
tokenadult 14y ago
Are we sure that this Wikipedia article, kindly submitted for our discussion, lays out the issues thoroughly? The Wikipedia article's talk page includes the tags "This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the project's quality scale. "This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale." What are Wikipedians doing about that? The article history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Illegal_number&action=history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Illegal_number&#38... makes it look like this is a rather sporadically edited article, which needs a lot of work. Are Hacker News participants willing to roll up their sleeves and jump in on editing the article? Or is that part of the problem on Wikipedia, that an article can be known to be lacking, but still not get fixed? Where else would one go to find good sources on this issue? I've got no special knowledge of this specialized issue, so I can't personally help. My experience as a Wikipedian, fixing articles I know how to fix, is that most Wikipedia articles on most subjects need a lot more reliable sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_...
baddox 14y ago
Not to mention the binary representation of every single copyrighted MP3, text, software, picture, etc. in every conceivable encoding and file format.
Leszek 14y ago
Let's rephrase this problem as not something that people will defend, e.g. anti-DRM, but something people will not defend; let's go straight for the big guns and use child pornography. Clearly, child pornography is illegal, and yet the images are just a series of 0s and 1s; these could potentially be re-interpreted as a single number, giving rise to the problem here. Or maybe each triplet of bytes of the JPEG's data could be represented as an RGB colour, and you could have a "child pornography flag" analogous to the free speech flag here, albeit a lot longer. Does this make it ok to distribute this number or this flag, because it's just a number/sequence of colours?
- aes256 14y ago
  I've never really understood the child pornography thing. Criminalizing mere possession of such images seems like a roundabout, largely ineffective, and perhaps even counterproductive, way of tackling the real issue; the sexual abuse of children. It blurs the very real and very important distinction between those who are sexually attracted to children and those who will act on that attraction to sexually abuse a child. It criminalizes the inquisitive, has the potential to make people inadvertent criminals, and ultimately — to return to the original subject matter — it makes a crime of possessing a particular sequence of 0s and 1s, which strikes me as particularly absurd. My personal suspicion is that sexual attraction to children (primarily referring to teenagers here) is not the abhorrent, unnatural illness that people speak of in public, but a perfectly natural, harmless preference that is far more commonplace than most people would like to admit. Ultimately, I'm for the free sharing of 0s and 1s in any order, and I'm not the least bit swayed by the child pornography challenge.
  - snowwrestler 14y ago
    Criminalizing the possession of child porn photos is a tool to assist in the capture of people who make child porn photos. A person facing prosecution for possession is highly motivated to reduce their own sentence by helping in the arrest and prosecution of the source of their images. If the source didn't make the photos, they certainly possessed them too, so it's possible to walk another link higher in the chain.
skybrian 14y ago
This sounds absurd only because we have a hard time really understanding the consequences of dealing with a vast search space. Yes, 128^140 is the space of all possible tweets (in ascii), but just because we're able to count them (sorta) and assign a number to each message doesn't actually give us any power over them. After all, the omega number [1] is just another number too. [1] http://plus.maths.org/content/omega-and-why-maths-has-no-toes http://plus.maths.org/content/omega-and-why-maths-has-no-toe...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pharrington 14y ago
Are people trying to say the context in which something happens shouldn't have legal bearing?
- nitrogen 14y ago
  People are trying to say that criminalization of the possession of or trafficking in so-called circumvention tools is absurd.
joesb 14y ago
They accused me of threatening to kill other people when all I did was just sending numbers, which happens to be interpreted by mobile phone to show on screen as "I'll kill your family if you don't do what I said". Apparently some numbers or are considered illegal.

Illegal Numbers

184 points by Pwnguinz 14y ago

FlukeATX 14y ago

The often relevant "What Colour are your bits?" - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

shasta 14y ago
Summary: "Illegal number" is a term that you use to refer to protected digital information when you also want to convey that you have no grasp of the legal issues involved.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Having read the article, I'm not sure if this summary is satirical or not. On the one hand, it sounds like it could be a relevant summary of his point, on the other hand it sounds like you're saying the author has no grasp of the legal issues involved. Can you clarify?
  - JoshTriplett 14y ago
    The author of that article specifically made a point of not calling either side "right" or "wrong"; the article just exists to help both sides understand the worldview of the other. Whichever mindset you hold, understanding the other mindset will help you make more effective arguments that don't sound inherently insane.
    - unimpressive 14y ago
      I'm aware, but the grandparent wrote a "summary" that could be read as either: His point, worded a little oddly. "The author got the law side wrong, and is yet another stupid nerd who doesn't get it."
      - JoshTriplett 14y ago
        From the perspective of the law, bits do have color, even though that makes no sense from a technical perspective. So, any given number may or may not qualify as "illegal" depending on how you generated it. That said, I don't think that makes the terms "illegal number" or "illegal prime" nonsensical, depending on context. In any case, I think the article doesn't deserve the pithy "summary" upthread; the summary provides actively unhelpful information if you haven't read the article.
        shasta 14y ago
        My summary was snarky, but "illegal number" is a silly term intended to emphasize that "it's just a number (so how could it be illegal?)", which is as sophisticated as the legal arguments "it's just a plastic disk with certain reflective properties" or "it's just some markings on a piece of paper." Your claim that bits having color "makes no sense from a technical perspective" sounds like more geek misunderstanding to me. There is no technical problem here -- only a problem of geeks applying technical results where they shouldn't.
        JoshTriplett 14y ago
        You've described one side of the debate, yes. The technical side has no less merit; don't dismiss it offhandedly. Hence why I find the essay on bits having color so useful: it frames the debate nicely without actually taking a side. The arguments you referenced would indeed make for relatively unsophisticated legal arguments, but they don't claim to be legal arguments; they're statements about technology and about how geeks want technology to work. They carry no less weight than statements about how lawyers want technology to work. Or, to put it more snarkily: your claim that bits have some unrepresentable property of "color" sounds like non-geek misunderstanding to me. There is no legal problem here -- only a problem of non-geeks applying legalistic results where they shouldn't. :) Let's not rehash the arguments that the essay already eloquently expresses; neither of us will get anywhere that way.
        shasta 14y ago
  - geofft 14y ago
    It sounds to me like he's saying that the author of the "Illegal number" article has no grasp of the legal (or philosophical) issues involved, not that the author of the "What color are your bits?" article has no grasp of it.
- ewillbefull 14y ago
  > you have no grasp of the legal issues involved Let's have a thread about it then. What legal issues am I misunderstanding? It seems to me that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are rather unprecedented. Brandenburg v. Ohio demonstrated that free speech protects abstract advocacy of force or law violation. The anti-circumvention provisions criminalize the distribution of not just software that can be directly used, but anything that serves as a tool to violate copyright. That could be a small number, a key, or even a description of how a DRM scheme operates. I cannot imagine a constitutional basis for those provisions of the DMCA. What say you?
  - wmf 14y ago
    A non-lawyerly devil's advocate: I would argue that a secret key by itself does not qualify as a circumvention tool and thus should not be banned by the DMCA. Unfortunately, by my reading the law does not agree with me and specifically bans distribution of a circumvention "device, component, or part thereof"; it seems like a key is a part of a circumvention device. Looking at circumvention code itself, I would argue that such code should have no artistic or political expression when boiled down to its functional essence, in which case there is no meaningful free speech issue. If the code did have artistic or political aspects, arguably those aspects could be separated from the part of the code which performs circumvention. For example, the political opinion of being opposed to the DMCA can be easily expressed without using any code.
  - Natsu 14y ago
    The courts seem to put copyright on a roughly equal level with the first amendment, so any censorship caused by them is considered to be by design. http://gigaom.com/2012/07/30/censorship-ok-to-fight-copyright-infringement-but-not-sex-abuse/ http://gigaom.com/2012/07/30/censorship-ok-to-fight-copyrigh...
  - shasta 14y ago
    > The anti-circumvention provisions criminalize the distribution of not just software that can be directly used, but anything that serves as a tool to violate copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm going to speculate that if you upload image.bmp, a picture you took with your camera, that happens by coincidence to contain a key that can be used for circumvention, then you would not be prosecuted or convicted. In other words, it's not the number that's illegal.

tshtf 14y ago

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

baaksies 14y ago

Numbers corresponding to obscenity depends entirely on the software that interprets and renders them, doesn't it? If I write software that translates the number 5 into obscenity, would 5 become illegal?

Evbn 14y ago
Not entirely, partially. If you could come up with an actual example, you may have a point.

jorts 14y ago

The first thing that comes to mind when looking at the flag are Windows 8 theme colors.

takluyver 14y ago

I'm intrigued by how the law would handle one time pad cryptography in such a case. You could produce two numbers of similar length, each on its own bearing no relationship to the 'illegal' number, but which can be combined to give that number. Then post them separately. Could either of them legally be taken down?

esrauch 14y ago
I believe they would both be infringing. The issue here is intent, and the intent of those two numbers are both to be used to recreate the original number. It's not any different than if one website had the first half and another had the second half. The alternative here would be if you could somehow find preexisting content whose intent was not to recreate this number. In that case it's trivial that the only infringing content would be something that told you how to recreate it based on those (eg if you just have a website for each digit that is trivially noninfringing, but a website that links to each of those websites in the correct order is infringing). It's easy to act like this is absurd because of the natural existing of numbers, but the law is generally pragrmatic and not concerned with extreme hypotheticals. You could similarly argue (and plenty have on internet forums) that every mp3 in existence could be found encoded somewhere in pi, which is technically true but absolutely irrelevant in copyright law; if you encode someones content in a novel encoding it's still infringing the other ephemeral protected content.
derekp7 14y ago
The only way to produce such a pair of numbers is by using the restricted material as a source -- therefore the numbers would be a derivative work. This is already covered under copyright law. Now there is a twist to this concept -- plausible deny-ability. Let's say Bob posts a non-infringing work encrypted with a one time pad (randomly generated), and also posts the one time pad too. Both files would appear to be random text until put together. Further, someone else, Bill, produces a "random" number by XORing the Bob's one-time pad with an infringing work, and uses the result as a one-time pad to encrypt another non-infringing work, and posts both of those files. The two one-time pads can recreate the infringing work by XORing them together. But you can't prove who's "random" file was actually randomly created, and which one was produced as a derivative work. Who do you send the take-down notice to?

cletus 14y ago

This is an interesting problem that we, as a society, need to deal with. HN's readership would be predominantly from a tech background with probably a reasonable basis in mathematics and the sciences. As such we can recognize some of the absurdities of the legal system, like how you can't patent a mathematical formula but you can patent software, which is ultimately indistinguishable from a formula in many (if not all?) cases. The question is naturally asked: if I make some number produce something illegal is that number then illegal? The engineers among us like absolute rules and certainty as a general rule. I've had a discussion with someone else about how a group of people could route each other's packets and then hypothetically law enforcement couldn't prove who they came from. The same argument comes up with "an IP address is not a person" arguments. While I sympathize with these arguments, this isn't how the legal system works. The law doesn't work on absolutely provable certainty. It works on reasonable doubt, intent and (hopefully) facts. So when it comes to numbers, one has to remember that numbers encode information (See [1]). So for a small integer to encode, say, an obscene image or a program that circumvents copy protection, it would require another program that actually does that. So if the number 7 produced a DeCSS circumvention program with a given program A, then program A is the problem, not the number 7. Now to turn any number into a video or a program or an image requires another program or infrastructure. Even if it's juaw the raw bytes of an i386/ELF program, you still need a kernel and a filesystem to run it. The test here, as I imagine the law would apply (IANAL), is whether the required infrastructure is general purpose or not. Turning the number 7 into something obscene can't be done with something general purpose. Turning a 1400 digit number into a program can. I don't like the stance of the US on IP, particularly the Obama administration, which has to be the most pro-IP anti-tech administration in US history (IMHO). I also don't like how selective enforcement is here. Share a few songs on Limewire and you'd up for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Really? At the same time, every city has a place you can go to buy pirate DVDs or counterfeit goods (eg Canal St in NYC). Why is this, which is actual trafficking for profit, ignored while the administration tries to elevate file-sharing to terrorism (the original ACTA draft)? Anyway, numbers are simply a way to represent information and that information is the problem, not the number. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

TeMPOraL 14y ago

KalobT 14y ago

I don't speak binary very well, so correct me if I'm wrong on this subject. If a number that represents illegal information is formed, that number is illegal. What if there is a larger number that has the illegal number in it? Example: 10 is illegal. 1000 has the number ten in it. The "10" can be filtered out.. How would this be handled?

Fargren 14y ago
What truly matter is intent. If you are trying to convey the illegal number, you are trying to break the law. If you accidentally transmit the bits that form the number while transmitting something else, you are not culpable. Obligatory IANAL.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
You are recognizing just one aspect of the inanity that is having "illegal" numbers.

rachelbythebay 14y ago

Sometimes when I'm feeling innocent and pure, I like to pretend that the world is a place where everyone realizes that "... everything is just zeroes and ones" and thus anything can represent anything else when viewed just the right way. That means everything is illegal, and so nothing is illegal. "This coke can plays the melody to Funkytown!" ... http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/26/encoding/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/26/encoding/ Then I snap out of it. It's right up there with "what if each of your fingernails contained a universe" talk: inevitable, but predictable.

rolux 14y ago

The main problem with "illegal numbers" seems to be that for any illegal number a, which represents someone's intellectual property or trade secret A, I can easily create two original pieces of intellectual property B and C so that b + c = a.

001sky 14y ago
This is a good point, as it the derivative notion: are my thoughts about illegal numbers, themselves, illegal. Evidentiary issues aside. etc.
wmf 14y ago
This is covered in "color", already posted in this thread.
Evbn 14y ago
Give us an actual example of b and c that are created without knowledge of a, and you may have case. But information theory says it is unlikely, if a is deeply original and not derivative of something like b and c to begin with.
- aes256 14y ago
  I may not be on the same wavelength as rolux here, but compression would be one example. Create B (a series of compressed files) and C (a decompressor), both unique creations in their own right, that when combined create the original work of another person, A. Now I'm no expert on compression, but there are surely a vast, if not infinite, number of possible pairs B and C that could combine to form the original copyrighted work. Thus, with copyright law in its current state, we are not simply granting copyright holders the exclusive rights to a particular sequencing of 1s and 0s, but also rights over any method of creating that sequence. If there are an infinite number of methods of creating that sequence — that is to say, any B, if combined with a suitable C could form A — then aren't we in effect granting rights over everything to the copyright holder? Where do we draw the line? The 1s and 0s that make up this post could, with suitable decompression, form an exact copy of a hit blockbuster, but neither this post nor the decompressor would resemble the blockbuster on their own. Edit: Interesting idea time. If I uploaded a series of files alleging they are encrypted copies of blockbuster films, but resolved not to release the encryption keys to any of the files for 12 months, would the copyright holders have the right to have the encrypted files taken down in the meantime? They can't actually prove that the files are infringing without the encryption key. Is the mere suggestion that a file may potentially, with some manipulation (i.e. decryption with the appropriate key), resemble a copyrighted work, sufficient to have it taken down?

rayiner 14y ago

There is a Latin term for arguments based on the reduction of software to numbers: reductio ad absurdum.

cbr 14y ago
You seem to be implying that the argument is absurd, but reductio ad absurdum is valid. "If X were true then we would have impossibility Y, so X must be false."

tokenadult 14y ago

Are we sure that this Wikipedia article, kindly submitted for our discussion, lays out the issues thoroughly? The Wikipedia article's talk page includes the tags "This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the project's quality scale. "This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale." What are Wikipedians doing about that? The article history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Illegal_number&action=history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Illegal_number&#38... makes it look like this is a rather sporadically edited article, which needs a lot of work. Are Hacker News participants willing to roll up their sleeves and jump in on editing the article? Or is that part of the problem on Wikipedia, that an article can be known to be lacking, but still not get fixed? Where else would one go to find good sources on this issue? I've got no special knowledge of this specialized issue, so I can't personally help. My experience as a Wikipedian, fixing articles I know how to fix, is that most Wikipedia articles on most subjects need a lot more reliable sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_...

baddox 14y ago

Not to mention the binary representation of every single copyrighted MP3, text, software, picture, etc. in every conceivable encoding and file format.

Leszek 14y ago

Let's rephrase this problem as not something that people will defend, e.g. anti-DRM, but something people will not defend; let's go straight for the big guns and use child pornography. Clearly, child pornography is illegal, and yet the images are just a series of 0s and 1s; these could potentially be re-interpreted as a single number, giving rise to the problem here. Or maybe each triplet of bytes of the JPEG's data could be represented as an RGB colour, and you could have a "child pornography flag" analogous to the free speech flag here, albeit a lot longer. Does this make it ok to distribute this number or this flag, because it's just a number/sequence of colours?

aes256 14y ago
I've never really understood the child pornography thing. Criminalizing mere possession of such images seems like a roundabout, largely ineffective, and perhaps even counterproductive, way of tackling the real issue; the sexual abuse of children. It blurs the very real and very important distinction between those who are sexually attracted to children and those who will act on that attraction to sexually abuse a child. It criminalizes the inquisitive, has the potential to make people inadvertent criminals, and ultimately — to return to the original subject matter — it makes a crime of possessing a particular sequence of 0s and 1s, which strikes me as particularly absurd. My personal suspicion is that sexual attraction to children (primarily referring to teenagers here) is not the abhorrent, unnatural illness that people speak of in public, but a perfectly natural, harmless preference that is far more commonplace than most people would like to admit. Ultimately, I'm for the free sharing of 0s and 1s in any order, and I'm not the least bit swayed by the child pornography challenge.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  Criminalizing the possession of child porn photos is a tool to assist in the capture of people who make child porn photos. A person facing prosecution for possession is highly motivated to reduce their own sentence by helping in the arrest and prosecution of the source of their images. If the source didn't make the photos, they certainly possessed them too, so it's possible to walk another link higher in the chain.

skybrian 14y ago

This sounds absurd only because we have a hard time really understanding the consequences of dealing with a vast search space. Yes, 128^140 is the space of all possible tweets (in ascii), but just because we're able to count them (sorta) and assign a number to each message doesn't actually give us any power over them. After all, the omega number [1] is just another number too. [1] http://plus.maths.org/content/omega-and-why-maths-has-no-toes http://plus.maths.org/content/omega-and-why-maths-has-no-toe...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pharrington 14y ago

Are people trying to say the context in which something happens shouldn't have legal bearing?

nitrogen 14y ago
People are trying to say that criminalization of the possession of or trafficking in so-called circumvention tools is absurd.

joesb 14y ago

They accused me of threatening to kill other people when all I did was just sending numbers, which happens to be interpreted by mobile phone to show on screen as "I'll kill your family if you don't do what I said". Apparently some numbers or are considered illegal.