So, has the law changed? What's its impact today?
Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#22Some context for people younger than me: This was a Big Thing On The Internet back in 2000. It was lovely, and it was where I discovered how a bunch of motivated nerds on the internet could make a dent. So anyway, the thing was DVDs were pretty new, and DVDs had "region protection". Cutting corners, this means that data on DVDs could be encrypted with different keys depending on which continent you were on, to allow…
>This was all straight from memory. I probably got some details wrong and I probably missed many great anecdotes.
Wow, that’s pretty impressive! Your comment made a pretty good article by itself; I’d encourage you to take those final polishing steps and publish it as an article or blog post.
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#23See also related Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for this writeup, this was before my time on the internet. > People remixed each other's work until the core DeCSS algorithm was only a single line of code. Gzipped, there was nearly nothing left What was the actual number? Can you post it here?
k·256^211 + 99
...where k is the decimal representation of the original compressed DeCSS file.
(just for context)
Note the implication: the prime basically is the original program represented as a binary number, then shifted 211 bytes (i.e., 00000000 appended 211 times). Then 99 is added to that number. Note that 99 is representable by a single byte.
Consequenly, if you take that prime number and chop off the last 211 bytes, you end up with the original program.
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for this writeup, this was before my time on the internet. > People remixed each other's work until the core DeCSS algorithm was only a single line of code. Gzipped, there was nearly nothing left What was the actual number? Can you post it here?
I recall a version that was an ascii string that you could save as a file with a .zip extension and it would unzip into the source.
I think that's in the steganography wing here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/index.html
> This gif file contributed by Robert de Bath, contains a surprise inside. Mr. Bath writes: "There are two tiny facts about GIF files and ZIP files you might like to know about: GIF files have their length defined at the start of the file; any bytes after are ignored. ZIP files have a table at the end; anything at the start of the file is ignored. The result is that a file can be both a GIF and a ZIP, just change the extension."
I also like the gallery, which contains a variety of code-golf like discussions of the edge cases of US 1st ammendment protections.
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#26pi, e, √2 are thought to be normal [0], which would make them Disjunctive sequences [1]. This means that every finite string appears as a substring in them, including for example all Shakespeare works, and the ADN of every person [2]. In particular they contain this illegal prime number, and the gzipped and non-gzipped versions of this program in every programming language possible. Does that mean that they may becom…
> πfs is a revolutionary new file system that, instead of wasting space storing your data on your hard drive, stores your data in π!
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#27pi, e, √2 are thought to be normal [0], which would make them Disjunctive sequences [1]. This means that every finite string appears as a substring in them, including for example all Shakespeare works, and the ADN of every person [2]. In particular they contain this illegal prime number, and the gzipped and non-gzipped versions of this program in every programming language possible. Does that mean that they may becom…
> πfs is a revolutionary new file system that, instead of wasting space storing your data on your hard drive, stores your data in π! https://github.com/philipl/pifs
Thanks for the reference. Even the github issues are fun to read. In particular this one is relevant here: PiFS installs large volumes of objectionable content and copyright violations (https://github.com/philipl/pifs/issues/2)
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#28So, has the law changed? What's its impact today?
DMCA (and similar in other countries) is still in force. It's still enforced, but selectively.
The UK has an approach which is almost sensible, but ends up being stupid. IP holders have rights to protection from illegal copying, and that's why law about circumvention of technological measure was introduced. Consumers also have rights to make copies in some situations, and those rights need to be protected. So consumers can ask the rights-holders for an exception, and can then go to the secretary of state if the IP holder declines to provide an exception.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/technological-pro...
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for this writeup, this was before my time on the internet. > People remixed each other's work until the core DeCSS algorithm was only a single line of code. Gzipped, there was nearly nothing left What was the actual number? Can you post it here?
I recall a version that was an ascii string that you could save as a file with a .zip extension and it would unzip into the source.
And I remember someone was selling t-shirts with that string!
Re: Illegal Prime Number? (2001)
#30pi, e, √2 are thought to be normal [0], which would make them Disjunctive sequences [1]. This means that every finite string appears as a substring in them, including for example all Shakespeare works, and the ADN of every person [2]. In particular they contain this illegal prime number, and the gzipped and non-gzipped versions of this program in every programming language possible. Does that mean that they may becom…
You can easily iterate over all binary strings to generate your illegal number too. That way you don't need to rely on the normality of transcendental numbers. If you concatenate all base numbers in base 2, you even get a number that's normal to base 2. There's no proof that it's normal to most other bases, though.