Call the cops.
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.
The authors are clearly targeting unsophisticated audience with that article; feels like the "sovereign citizen" grade of legal analysis.
I think its asininity (or whatever) is the point. The idea that information can be illegal leads, I think ineluctably, to the 'illegal primes'; so I think that this is meant as a slightly snarky argument against the idea that information can be illegal.
The article links to "illegal numbers", which weasely states "if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well". Note the "may", and the only references seem to be pure speculation.
Some people argue any kind of copyright and IP rights should be abolished, but who would argue it should be completely legal to phone in a bomb threat because "it is really just a number represented as sound"?
Well yes, the notion of illegal numbers is a construct of the silly argument presented. You can decompose anything proscribed into the elements that make it up and then try to claim the elements are ipso facto proscribed.
Mens rea, for example, is really referring to sequences of electrical impulses in your brain, so again by the line of argument there is a physical phenomenon that is criminial.
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.
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.
The article isn't great in how it explains, and it's unfriendly toward the legal profession, but it makes the same claims you do.
rayiner: > If you can prove that the bits came from an RNG that’s not copyright infringement.
article: > It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator.
We can try applying your narrative to the number 3.14, supposing laws had made finding the circumference of a circle illegal. Sure, "3.14" isn't illegal on its own (and sometimes it even shows up in the amount of change you're owed). But referencing the number is basically referencing a specific use. And so we can infer that the people broadcasting the number are doing so to highlight how easy finding the circumference of a circle is, and thus induce people to do so.
The informational content of 3.14 is say 12 bits and the original AACS key is 128 bits. Whereas a movie is roughly 10,000,000,000 bits, and even a song is around 32,000,000 bits. These "illegal primes" are very close, if not in, the domain of bona fide facts. And the law generally doesn't criminalize facts (like 3.14), although not for lack of trying!
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.
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?
To complete the 'illegality' you need three pieces of information used in tandem:
1) the prime number (which is innocent in its own right)
2) the decompression algorithm (also innocent in its own right)
3) the knowledge that some specific prime number, when viewed through the lens of the decompression algorithm, yields an 'illegal' interpretation. (not illegal in its own right?)
The issue only comes from all three being present. If you have #2 and #3, #1 can be the last puzzle piece needed to create the required set, but no one piece is in-and-of-itself the source of the issue.
Of course, if the compression algorithm is one that's very commonly used like gzip or jpeg, a jury will infer intent from the totality of the circumstances and your lawyer will have a really hard time talking them out of it.
For instance, if you encoded the entire design of a nuclear weapon (or some other highly classified military secret) inside a prime, saying "but it's just a prime!" is a very silly excuse for exchanging that information. The question is: "what kind of information should be illegal to exchange", not "which format of information should be protected".
"11234349387298245791029384857" may or may not be an illegal number. Nobody cares and mathematicians can use it to their heart's content. That is, until I attach the metadata to it: "This number is the AES key embedded in every YthnVideo Disc Player". Now it's illegal. Number = legal. Number + metadata = illegal.
At least, that's how it should be.
By having enough capacity for organised violence to make their will stick. And if they lose that, they are no longer a government.
The only major dispute between governments is which groups of minorities to target.
If they dont do this, no one cares about 'the law'.
I think that intent and plausibility play the most important roles here.
Also, if the number of bits you need to describe an illegal prime is of the same order as the number of bits in the prime itself, then you have a weak case.
I sometimes make the joke that unicode sequences make people extremely angry. It's a gentle reminder not to take everything so seriously. But everyone still understands that it isn't actually the sequential placement of glyphs that make people angry.
Whenever this attempt at reductio-ad-absurdem comes up, I find it pretty unconvincing. It's not that they are banning a number, just like if you make certain images illegal you're not banning "light" and if you make slander illegal you're not banning "sound, which is just vibrations in the air." Describing the medium of speech is kind of silly, because the point is the information contained in the media. The fact that the law addresses abstract concepts isn't exactly groundbreaking.
Everything is information. How can murder be forbidden? It's just an arrangement of quarks?!
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
[2] http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/11/since-pi-is-infinit...
Naw man, physics still apply, you dont get gandalf just because you went a few million light years toward Andromedia
So on average, the offset for a given binary sequence will be on the order of 2^N (I’ve used some hand-waving here). You need N bits for that, you you’ve gained basically nothing.
Edited to fixed terrible spelling
That reminds me of a compression program I once wrote. It had the following properties:
1. It accepts any non-empty file other than a file consisting of a single 0 byte.
2. It is easily reversible.
3. The output is never larger than the input.
4. The output is smaller than the input for some files.
5. If a file is larger than 1 byte, iterating enough times will always eventually produce a smaller file. What is "enough times" depends on the file content.
(I wrote this partly as a joke, and partly as a counterexample to some proofs I'd seen on Usenet about the limitations of compression programs where the proofs had not been sufficiently precise in specifying the conditions necessary for them to apply).
It is actually quite simple:
1. If the file is empty or a single byte that is 0, report that the input is not acceptable and exit.
2. If the file is N bytes, treat it as if it is an 8N bit unsigned integer, I.
3. If I is 0, the output file is N-1 bytes all with value 0xFF.
4. If I is not 0, subtract 1, and output the result.
(Decompression is left as an exercise for the reader).
Another way to look at this is to imagine that we have a sorted list of all possible files. The primary sort key is file size. The secondary sort key is the numerical value of the file when treated as an 8N bit unsigned integer, where N is the file size.
My compression algorithm is simply to replace each file with the file immediately ahead of it on that file list.
Viewed that way, it is pretty obvious that all my claims are true. It accepts any non-empty file other than the first file on the list (single 0 byte). To reverse it, replace the input with the file immediately after it from the list. The list is ordered by file size, so stepping down in the list never gives a larger file, and sometimes gives a smaller file. The output file is on the list, so you can obviously iterate.
The catch, of course, is that while yes, you can take your 1 TB of arbitrary data (even true random data!) and apply my algorithm iteratively to get down to, say, a 1 byte file, and yes, you can apply the decompression algorithm iteratively to recover your 1 TB from, to do that you have to know how many times to iterate on the decompression end.
The number of iterations required for an uncompressed file of N bytes to compress down to a byte is on the order of 2^(8N), so you will need about N bytes to store the iteration count.
So net result is that it can replace an N byte file with a 1 byte file...but it is going to drop N bytes of metadata on you that you'll need to store somewhere.
This is not true. Pi is probably irrational, which means we know it doesn't repeat itself. However, it is not proven to be normal, so it's a conjecture (but not fact) that it contains every finite sequence of digits at some point.
Well it does, trivially.
You’re probably thinking of set theory but the file system is about storing information in a sequence and an offset. Seen that way, π can be stored with offset 0.
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.
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.
All current computer media can be represented as an integer. You're suggesting that no media is illegal?
There is a lot of content out there which is illegal to possess, not just DMCA circumvention, and thanks to the wonderful power of mathematics that content can always be expressed as a number.
Extending your analogy, you could have a random bit sequence, XOR it with the content and distribute only the random sequence and the XORed sequence, making it a nonce-sense.
You might even decline to mention which well-defined bit sequence you used, and just leave it as an exercise for the reader to try XORing with pi, e, phi, sqrt(2), etcetera on their own.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There should be a whole industry about it.
Doesn’t change the legal situation, of course.
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.
