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Illegal Prime Numbers

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Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#91

Post by dane-pgp »

panosfilianos wrote: post #5

What's interesting in this case is that I may know that an entity has such a number in possession. By encrypting sensitive IP with that number, do I force that entity to break the law?

Hopefully the targeted entity could prove that they had the number in their possession for longer than your encrypted data existed, but this is an interesting question.

It seems like it's logically or legally equivalent to setting your password to someone else's date of birth and then claiming that they have hacked you because they know your password.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#92

Post by tshaddox »

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.

It’s not particularly interesting and almost certainly not viable as a useful method of compression. It’s essentially just using pi as a pseudo-random number generator and encoding the desired message as an index into the output sequence of the PRNG. If it sounds slightly more interesting than that, it’s probably only because pi has a lot of mystique around it in popular culture.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#93

Post by dane-pgp »

whatgoodisaroad wrote: post #79

I could imagine a somewhat cynical science fiction story where Earth manages to communicate with an intelligent alien species using fundamental constants and rules of mathematics. But then, the aliens transmit a prime that the humans have happened to have declared illegal and have no choice but descend into interplanetary copyright war.

Slightly more realistic would be a story about a technocratic nation that changed its flag to something like a "Free Speech Flag" (as mentioned in another comment) containing a representation of an illegal number, with the global media industry then conspiring to generate support amongst the public for regime change in that nation.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#95

Post by c22 »

tshaddox wrote: post #92
curryst wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not particularly interesting and almost certainly not viable as a useful method of compression. It’s essentially just using pi as a pseudo-random number generator and encoding the desired message as an index into the output sequence of the PRNG. If it sounds slightly more interesting than that, it’s probably only because pi has a lot of mystique around it in popular culture.

If you tweak your prng to output the "interesting content" at the beginning then you've created algorithmic content which is very interesting and can look a lot like compression at first glance.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#96

Post by drdeca »

lostcolony wrote: post #85
snappieT wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take copyrighted material and put it on a daycare mural, then you _intended_ to put copyrighted material on a daycare mural. It is not about intent to damage, it's just pure intent.

What you're saying is that action = intent. Meaning intent is immaterial; the action is proof of intent. I.e., the opposite of caring about intent. To prove intent you'd have to prove the daycare knew the works were copyrighted (i.e., the distinction between public domain Snow White, and Disney's Snow White), knew the copyright law sufficiently to know this was infringing (i.e., painting on the interior of a daycare…

This isn't the intent being referred to. They aren't referring to "intent to violate copyright law".

If your intent is to comment on Shakespeare, and it happens that what you produced, when run through some process, produces something under copyright, but the thing you intended to express doesn't, I don't think that would violate copyright law? Or at least, no one would convict you.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#97

Post by bzbarsky »

lupire wrote: post #59
jdc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet regardless debate about hypotheticals, Phil Carmody discovered the first non-trivial executable titanic prime, Professor Caldwell published it and neither of them faced repercussions.

Why would it be illegal to publish that particular executable? Was it harmful?

It circumvented the copy protection on DVDs. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#98

Post by bzbarsky »

Y_Y wrote: post #35
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…

Do you imagine a judge would just say "well fuck it, he published the illegal number, but appended some shit to the end, so maybe it's just an astronomical coincidence"?

The point is, if the resulting prime number is large enough to be in the very public "list of N largest known primes", how do you keep it out of that list, exactly?

But also, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, your hypothetical is more or less what happened with the DeCSS primes Phil Carmody published. Except it never even got to a judge.

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#99

Post by comboy »

dane-pgp wrote: post #80
comboy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> So where do you draw the line? A reasonable suggestion would be to draw the line around private data. By design, DRM is intended to restrict people's use of data which the publisher wants to spread as widely as possible (on the condition that they are paid for every copy). This data is therefore not private in any sense. All your other examples work with this line: Private keys are obviously private; internal compa…

It somewhat pushes the answer into "private" definition but it does sound good.

But then, if a company implements DRM using its private key and somebody steals that private key?

Re: Illegal Prime Numbers

#100

Post by goatcode »

whatgoodisaroad wrote: post #79

I could imagine a somewhat cynical science fiction story where Earth manages to communicate with an intelligent alien species using fundamental constants and rules of mathematics. But then, the aliens transmit a prime that the humans have happened to have declared illegal and have no choice but descend into interplanetary copyright war.

That's how you deal with trolls from countries with very strict language laws.
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