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Illegal Prime Numbers

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Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#41

Post by grishka »

jasode wrote: post #17

There are several past threads of this article but this comment about how the DeCSS illegal prime was created seemed the most interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045394 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…

Because "illegal information" is an entirely artificial concept that doesn't hold if you think too much about it. You can't exactly "own" information, neither can you "destroy" it.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#42

Post by dTal »

praptak wrote: post #14

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.

Exactly. Primality is nothing more than a misleading intuition pump to make you think in terms of "innocent bit of number theory", instead of "encoded data file". Even the term "illegal number" is designed to make you think this way; somehow, "legally protected secret" doesn't sound quite so absurd.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#43

Post by dTal »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #16

Taking the same idea further, there are plenty of (possibly) illegal numbers that don't even have to be prime, just because an ASCII-encoded string of text can be represented as a number. 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…

The minimum reasonable size of an "illegal number" is fairly comprehensively explored here [0] (tl;dr 128 bits)

(You needn't be kept up at night by the thought of accidentally publishing nuclear codes; as you say, the probability is 0 for all practical purposes, and the reluctance of government agents to dismiss it as a coincidence would be entirely reasonable)

[0] https://qntm.org/number

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#44

Post by lovelyviking »

>it describes a computer program that bypasses the digital rights management scheme used on DVDs.

Hiding number is not a proper way to address the issue. We should address the core of it - drm which should be made illegal.

What is strange for me is that making digital rights management program that does who knows what and thus breaks any privacy by definition is not illegal but some number that merely describes a computer program that bypasses such program is. This is not crazy? Why it should be illegal to protect own computer from malware?

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#45

Post by bostonpete »

KMnO4 wrote: post #32

The process is fairly simple. 1. Take illegal number 2. GZip it, or at least store it in a format that discards trailing null bytes. 3. Multiply it by a power of 256 Every power of 256 adds a zero to the end, in the same way that multiplying 5x10=50, 5x100=500, etc. 4. Add a an integer and check primality; repeat. So if the illegal number was 12345 your could have an illegal prime 1234500000071 represented by (12345x…

Just to be clear -- b/c I got a bit confused reading this -- this example seems to assume "12345" and "71" are base-256 numbers and "256" is base-10.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#46

Post by vbezhenar »

praptak wrote: post #19
vbezhenar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bob publishes encrypted data. If it’s legal, just use AES with known pass phrase, its output looks random enough.

The point of the protocol is that both Bob and Alice can claim they were publishing a fully random string of bits and there is no way to disprove it. I don't see how the known pass phrase achieves that.

There's a way to prove it by XORing their streams. Just like there's a way to prove that given stream is AES-encrypted by trying to decrypt it with key published by Alice.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#47

Post by comboy »

lovelyviking wrote: post #44

>it describes a computer program that bypasses the digital rights management scheme used on DVDs. Hiding number is not a proper way to address the issue. We should address the core of it - drm which should be made illegal. What is strange for me is that making digital rights management program that does who knows what and thus breaks any privacy by definition is not illegal but some number that merely describes a com…

Obviously. But the issue is not that simple. Do you think any kind of information should be protected by law? Because I can think of a few examples.

Actually, I believe we are going towards information being the thing that has value, we should arrive there, assuming abundance (on a human scale of course, energy is still required to sustain any patterns), material goods being just things that can be copied.

So where do you draw the line? If you get caught with my private keys is that ok & legal? What if I get caught with internal documents of some company? Espionage? Facebook just keeping some big numbers around? How do you implement privacy that you seem to care about without some numbers being illegal?

Also remember you bought/installed that malware or agreed to it. And no, I don't like DRM, I do agree that it is insane, but without presenting a coherent view where that problem is not present it's just being angry about the sky being blue.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#48

Post by CivBase »

jasode wrote: post #17

There are several past threads of this article but this comment about how the DeCSS illegal prime was created seemed the most interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045394 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…

It would be much easier to create a "free speech flag" instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#49

Post by privacylawthrow »

jasode wrote: post #17

There are several past threads of this article but this comment about how the DeCSS illegal prime was created seemed the most interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045394 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…

The law cares about intent and outcome. If you intended to publish Bill Gates' credit card number and did so, and if doing so was a crime, you'd be guilty of that crime. This is true regardless of how you published the information. There is no "out" for putting it behind a pretext.

It's why sharing child pornography is illegal, even though all the creators are really doing is sharing a set of instructions for someone's else's computer to generate the image/video.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#50

Post by sorokod »

jasode wrote: post #17

There are several past threads of this article but this comment about how the DeCSS illegal prime was created seemed the most interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045394 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…

Presumably applying the "Right to be forgotten" to data encoded on the blockchain will wreak havoc on it's immutability aspect.
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