Illegal Prime Numbers

Post by lupire » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

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…

Post by Blikkentrekker » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

privacylawthrow wrote: post #49

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…

Post by ACS_Solver » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #43

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

Post by thestoicattack » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

curryst wrote: post #66

amelius wrote: post #39

People believe (although there is no proof) that any finite sequence of bits appears somewhere in pi, making pi an illegal number :) https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/216343/does-pi-cont...

If true, that could be an exceptionally interesting method of compression. Any volume of data can be compressed to two numbers: an offset and a length. Presuming we have a way to "stream" the numbers, rather than having to calculate the entire value.

Post by vbezhenar » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #57

vbezhenar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that a crucial point about XOR-based systems is that both Bob and Alice can produce the "other half" of their random-looking file which produces a legitimate non-random file (e.g. a video of their holiday), while claiming that the other party maliciously used the "first half" as the random-looking input against which they XORed their forbidden file. Unless an omniscient observer knows the publication date of…