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Illegal Numbers

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Re: Illegal Numbers

#51

Post by zanny »

cletus wrote: post #13

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 al…

I just want to mention every movie ever translated to a digital format, every song rendered as an mp3, and every image or sound ever made digital is in effect a very long number in binary form that can be interpreted by decoders to produce copyrighted material. Are all those numbers illegal to distribute, or even copy if you already have an instance of such a number? That is a lot of numbers. Big numbers too.

Re: Illegal Numbers

#53

Post by iopq »

cletus wrote: post #13

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 al…

>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 winzip is the problem, not the zipped file? ridiculous statement, bro

fine, you still need to play the file, so media player is the problem? obviously, it's the source file, not the generic tools that work on everything

Re: Illegal Numbers

#54

Post by Leszek »

aes256 wrote: post #33
Leszek wrote: post #28

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…

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 chil…

Fine, replace child pornography with a text file containing your name, birthday, social security number, credit card details, email password and mother's maiden name, the argument is the same.

Re: Illegal Numbers

#56

Post by dbaupp »

iopq wrote: post #53
cletus wrote: post #13

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 al…

>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 winzip is the problem, not the zipped file? ridiculous statement, bro fine, you still need to play the file, so media player is the problem? obviously, it's the source file, not the generic tools that work on everything

That's actually the parent's point. Except specific to large integers, because there aren't enough small ones to encode anything meaningful that can be decoded by a general purpose program.

Re: Illegal Numbers

#57

Post by a3_nm »

rolux wrote: post #17

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 .

As a general rule, using secret sharing protocols, for any choice of n and k, you can split any illegal piece of information a into n pieces such that k of these pieces together can reconstitute a but Related: http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/freespeech.html (does something similar using XOR, and discusses interesting uses of that kind of system).

Re: Illegal Numbers

#58

Post by adrianN »

shasta wrote: post #39
ewillbefull wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dir…

> 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 w…

But does it become illegal if someone (maybe not even you) points out that starting at bit 123094 you find the key to unlock your PS3?

Re: Illegal Numbers

#59

Post by joesb »

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.

Re: Illegal Numbers

#60

Post by lmm »

Leszek wrote: post #54
aes256 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chil…

Fine, replace child pornography with a text file containing your name, birthday, social security number, credit card details, email password and mother's maiden name, the argument is the same.

There would be no crime in possessing such a file, nor should there be. It would and should be criminal to use it to impersonate me, or to access my emails without permission.
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