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I understand that one number can be the binary equivalent of a protected source code, but I don't understand why the fact that it is a prime number is important.
If it was composite then at least you could factor it into (hopefully) legal numbers and distribute those. :P No, jokes aside I don’t know either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was composite then at least you could factor it into (hopefully) legal numbers and distribute those. :P No, jokes aside I don’t know either.
You can still distribute as a sum of legal numbers.
Therefore I don't see how those numbers being prime changes anything. This looks to me like a weak argument that tries to take advantage of poor intuitions that some people have about primes.
Yes, the IP laws are ridiculous but this is not a good argument to support this opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was composite then at least you could factor it into (hopefully) legal numbers and distribute those. :P No, jokes aside I don’t know either.
You can still distribute as a sum of legal numbers.
Alice publishes a truly random string of bits, Bob publishes a XOR of Alice's string with an "illegal" number. Information theory says you cannot tell which is which (and publishing a random string of bits is supposedly legal) but you can still retrieve the "illegal" number by xoring Alice's and Bob's strings.
A pair of GPS coordinates with five decimal precision, written like 7.63941, -122.12825 is just 19 ASCII characters. So in ~400 characters you could have 20 such pairs. 400 ASCII characters being 400 bytes or 3200 bits, they can be represented by a number that's 400 characters is surely also enough for many other bits of highly classified information. Several names of CIA agents under non-official cover in China. A concise description of the purpose and capabilities of the X-37 spacecraft. The top item on the President's Daily Brief for today.
It raises some interesting questions about the legality of numbers, and what would happen to someone publishing one. What if I'm writing an article that happens to contain the nuclear-submarine-coordinates-encoding number? What if I'm writing about a debugging problem and I show a memory dump that happens to contain it? The actual probability of that happening is of course zero, but something tells me that anyone who did publish such a number would suddenly find themselves in the company of government agents very willing to overlook that person's rights.
This might be thought of as a human version of a covert channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel
E.g. publicizing the number and expiration date of Bill Gates' credit-card is illegal but what if we wrote a text commentary about Shakespeare's Hamlet that when SHA-1 hashed, it gives you that same information? Yes, it would be very computationally intensive to generate a plausible literary text but it could be done. Or one embeds Bill Gates credit-card number as "transactions amounts" on Bitcoin blockchain.
The theme is the same: find a "legitimate" information channel to transmit illegitimate data. This then allows the philosophical arguments about information:
- How can commentary about Shakespeare be illegal? It's education!
- How can you censor transactions on the bitcoin blockchain? There are already 100,000+ copies of it on nodes around the globe! And so on...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still distribute as a sum of legal numbers.
There's a proof-of-concept file sharing protocol (Monotone? I cannot remember the name. Edit: it's monolith.sourceforge.net) that distributes numbers as xor of legal numbers. Alice publishes a truly random string of bits, Bob publishes a XOR of Alice's string with an "illegal" number. Information theory says you cannot tell which is which (and publishing a random string of bits is supposedly legal) but you can still…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a proof-of-concept file sharing protocol (Monotone? I cannot remember the name. Edit: it's monolith.sourceforge.net) that distributes numbers as xor of legal numbers. Alice publishes a truly random string of bits, Bob publishes a XOR of Alice's string with an "illegal" number. Information theory says you cannot tell which is which (and publishing a random string of bits is supposedly legal) but you can still…
Bob publishes encrypted data. If it’s legal, just use AES with known pass phrase, its output looks random enough.
I don't see how the known pass phrase achieves that.
Primes are pretty dense. If you can encode something as a number, then you can encode it as a prime number with enough padding. Therefore I don't see how those numbers being prime changes anything. This looks to me like a weak argument that tries to take advantage of poor intuitions that some people have about primes. Yes, the IP laws are ridiculous but this is not a good argument to support this opinion.
Isn’t this what godel’s encoding does?