[HN Gopher] Illegal Prime Numbers
___________________________________________________________________
Illegal Prime Numbers
Author : neatze
Score : 206 points
Date : 2021-04-12 07:56 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| FrozenVoid wrote:
| If any number is illegal, all numbers in such size range A xor B
| can be made illegal(even though A or B are both perfectly
| mundane, xoring them creates an illegal number, so they're now
| illegal too). * Xoring the original illegal number with any
| random legal number A of same size creates a new (also random)
| number B that (A xor B) restores the original.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| How clueless about mathematics do you have to be, as a
| professional in the legal field, to propose this type of garbage?
|
| Mathematicians (in my humble experience) are also pretty clueless
| about law, but at least they can't just make up shit that is
| fundamentally incompatible with reality[0]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
| sleavey wrote:
| Just goes to show that copyright laws are incompatible with
| reality.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Copyright laws exist exclusively for the benefit of lawyers.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| If N is illegal, then could N+1 be legal or not?
| SamBam wrote:
| I think the purpose is the intent.
|
| If the source code to Microsoft Windows is illegal, is the
| source code plus one bit of padding at the end illegal? How
| about two bits? How about an XOR transform with some random
| number, which I also publish online? How can Microsoft
| copyright an infinite number of variations of their source
| code?
|
| The answer is that they obviously can't, but all those variants
| are illegal if the purpose is to get back to that same source
| code. If you're transforming their source code, and providing
| some obvious or non-obvious key for how to get from your
| transformation to the original, you're violating copyright.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think all we can say is that if N is an illegal prime, then
| N+1 is not an illegal prime.
|
| Well, I suppose a government _could_ try to ban the numbers 2
| and 3, but it might have trouble complying with that law
| itself.
| dezmou wrote:
| I understand that one number can be the binary equivalent of a
| protected source code, but I don't understand why the fact that
| it is a prime number is important.
| bjornsing wrote:
| If it was composite then at least you could factor it into
| (hopefully) legal numbers and distribute those. :P
|
| No, jokes aside I don't know either.
| heroku wrote:
| You can still distribute as a sum of legal numbers.
| st_goliath wrote:
| "Any integer can be expressed uniquely as a sum of unique
| powers of even primes."
| praptak wrote:
| There's a proof-of-concept file sharing protocol (Monotone?
| I cannot remember the name. Edit: it's
| monolith.sourceforge.net) that distributes numbers as xor
| of legal numbers.
|
| Alice publishes a truly random string of bits, Bob
| publishes a XOR of Alice's string with an "illegal" number.
| Information theory says you cannot tell which is which (and
| publishing a random string of bits is supposedly legal) but
| you can still retrieve the "illegal" number by xoring
| Alice's and Bob's strings.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Bob publishes encrypted data. If it's legal, just use AES
| with known pass phrase, its output looks random enough.
| praptak wrote:
| 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.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| 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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| 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 all the "halves" in the system, it is impossible to
| say which of Bob or Alice are telling the truth.
|
| Of course, both parties are inherently slightly
| suspicious for using such a system in the first place,
| but if it existed as part of a free public hosting
| service, and lots of people used it for legitimate
| purposes, it might only be as incriminating as using
| BitTorrent.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| That's covered by this essay:
| https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
| DataWraith wrote:
| You're probably thinking of the OFFSystem
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem)
| praptak wrote:
| This seems to use the same underlying idea as Monolith
| (which is the one I thought of - edited)
| dezmou wrote:
| I Missread it
|
| "...worthy of being published on the lists of the highest prime
| numbers.[1] In a way, by having this number independently
| published for a completely unrelated reason to the DeCSS code,
| he had been able to evade legal responsibility for the original
| software."
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| Just because it has a secondary reason of interest, it
| doesn't negate the original intent (especially when the
| original intent has been documented by the author). I doubt
| this would stand up if legally challenged.
|
| Primes are pretty dense in the integers - unless you're going
| to say 'data can't be illegal' - including e.g. CP, then
| highlighting illegal primes is simply not a valid evasion.
| antirez wrote:
| Not only this concept has a great deal of triviality, because
| everything you can digitally encode will have a corresponding
| prime (often you can change the encoding slightly, yet the binary
| format is still valid, so you can perform random changes and run
| a fast primality test, until you find a good candidate).
|
| It is also a reversible concept: you can create an "illegal
| painting" by encoding a number in the painting, so that
| interpreting the painting in some way (like, splitting it in a
| X*Y grid, and assigning 1 to the squares where the red component
| in RGB is greater than G, 0 otherwise) will result in such
| number.
|
| What's the gist of all this? That reality can be represented by
| numbers and the other way around, however numbers representing
| illegal digital entities (violating copyright or other laws) are
| so unlikely to happen by chance, that they need to be chosen
| explicitly to have such a representation: the illegal prime is
| just a different way to write the same thing in a file, thus is
| the same blatant law violation, and the fact they happen to have
| a prime number (very dense and common numbers) is not interesting
| at all.
| batch12 wrote:
| > What's the gist of all this?
|
| The point, per the article, is a protest against the censorship
| of information. People may not think twice about making a
| computer program illegal. However, banning a number would get
| more attention. The point is exactly as you have noted-- it's
| the same thing.
| panosfilianos wrote:
| 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?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| 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.
| praptak wrote:
| 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.
| abhishekjha wrote:
| > If you can encode something as a number, then you can encode
| it as a prime number with enough padding.
|
| Isn't this what godel's encoding does?
| karatinversion wrote:
| No, everything but single characters are composite numbers in
| Godel encoding
| dTal wrote:
| 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.
| zests wrote:
| There is no question that the person creating and publishing
| the prime is infringing copyright. However, they aren't the
| ones actually publishing the information. The copyright
| infringer creates the prime, proves something interesting about
| it and then the fan websites (like PrimePages mentioned in the
| articles) actually distribute the primes.
| jdc wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Why would it be illegal to publish that particular
| executable? Was it harmful?
| bzbarsky wrote:
| It circumvented the copy protection on DVDs. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
| dezmou wrote:
| Does the guy actualy had to test many version of the code by
| adding some useless instruction only to change the binary final
| number ? like mining a bitcoin
| teddyh wrote:
| This is pretending that bits don't have color1. In one way they
| don't, but in another they do.
|
| 1. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
| feanaro wrote:
| How would the concept of colour be used practically in this
| case? Am I allowed to mention the prime number or am I not?
| praptak wrote:
| > Am I allowed to mention the prime number or am I not?
|
| Since "the colour" is the whole context which led to you
| mentioning the prime number, the answer is "it depends".
|
| In practice you can publish it as a part of mathematical
| paper on primes. You cannot publish it saying "here's a prime
| that decoded as X does illegal thing Y".
|
| Anything in-between is gray zone, with the disclaimer that
| courts don't like "clever" schemes that try mess with the
| "colour". So if you try to publish a fake mathematical paper
| to thumb your nose at the illegality of publishing something,
| the court will be unsympathetic.
| teddyh wrote:
| It depends of the color of the number. If the color is that
| of a simple prime number, which you mention purely for its
| characteristics as a number, then you would theoretically be
| allowed. Otherwise not.
| isitdopamine wrote:
| Interesting read!
|
| It's essentially the opposite of Aaron Swartz's famous "Bits
| are not a bug" writeup.
| amelius wrote:
| 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...
| curryst wrote:
| 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.
| thestoicattack wrote:
| We do have such a digit-extraction algorithm: https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%9...
| zild3d wrote:
| also means the offset can be larger than the data
| SamBam wrote:
| ...and almost always is, except in the trivial cases of
| tiny numbers right near the start. Which is why it doesn't
| actually work as an encryption algorithm.
|
| The other idea I've always liked is a length that, to
| enough precision, encodes something in the decimal places.
| Then in theory you could just cut something, say a diamond,
| to this impossible precision, and then measure it later. I
| assume that, like the Pi example, this is impractical not
| only in practice but even in theory, even if we had
| impossibly-accurate cutters and measurers.
| tyilo wrote:
| This has been done: https://github.com/philipl/pifs
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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.
| c22 wrote:
| 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.
| gnulinux wrote:
| That would not be compression since the number of bits
| required to store offset would on average be larger than the
| number of bits required to store the actual data.
| MayeulC wrote:
| > Following this, Carmody discovered an 1811-digit prime--this
| one being non-compressed, directly executable machine language in
| the ELF format for Linux i386, implementing the same DeCSS
| functionality.
|
| I found that to be an interesting rabbit hole:
| https://primes.utm.edu/glossary/page.php?sort=ExecutablePrim...
| whatgoodisaroad wrote:
| 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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| 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.
| goatcode wrote:
| That's how you deal with trolls from countries with very strict
| language laws.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| This rabbithole led me to http://fatphil.org/maths/illegal2.html
| - non-trivial executable primenumbers are amazing.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Quote: "Its binary representation corresponds to a compressed
| version of the C source code of a computer program implementing
| the DeCSS decryption algorithm, which can be used by a computer
| to circumvent a DVD's copy protection"
|
| That's a stretch. Same as Botswana's currency (Pula) which is a
| slang in Romania for male genitalia. Or India's ancient swastika
| symbol that is pretty much illegal in Western countries.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| 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 (12345x256^8+71).
|
| The only reason you'd want to do this is because people actually
| share seemingly random prime numbers online. There's no legal
| reason to share the DeCSS encryption code, but a prime number
| with a length of 2000 is "interesting" enough to avoid legal
| issue.
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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"?
| bzbarsky wrote:
| 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.
| bostonpete wrote:
| 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.
| Zircom wrote:
| Once you compress the number it becomes stored in base-256
| due to how the gzip file format works was my understanding
| bostonpete wrote:
| Sure, the benefit of base-256 is that a 0 maps to a byte
| with all 0's in the binary representation of the integer --
| it's nothing specific to gzip. But on its face,
| 12345x256^8+71 = 1234500000071 is just wrong and only works
| once you realize that it's combining integers from
| different number systems.
| lovelyviking wrote:
| >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?
| comboy wrote:
| 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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > 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 company documents are "private"
| in the same sense that corporations are people; government
| secrets are private (and countries are legal people); and
| Facebook should be keeping people's personal data secret on
| their behalf.
| comboy wrote:
| 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?
| lupire wrote:
| Why should is be illegal for consenting adults to agree to use
| software to manage an agreement? No one is forcing you to use
| DRM.
|
| Ethereum is also DRM.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| 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 represented by a number
| that's < 2^3200. What if the 20 pairs of coordinates are current
| locations of US nuclear submarines? That would make the ~900
| digit number very dangerous from the US military's point of view.
|
| 400 characters is surely also enough for many other bits of
| highly classified information. Several names of CIA agents under
| non-official cover in China. A concise description of the purpose
| and capabilities of the X-37 spacecraft. The top item on the
| President's Daily Brief for today.
|
| It raises some interesting questions about the legality of
| numbers, and what would happen to someone publishing one. What if
| I'm writing an article that happens to contain the nuclear-
| submarine-coordinates-encoding number? What if I'm writing about
| a debugging problem and I show a memory dump that happens to
| contain it? The actual probability of that happening is of course
| zero, but something tells me that anyone who did publish such a
| number would suddenly find themselves in the company of
| government agents very willing to overlook that person's rights.
| uuidgen wrote:
| But those numbers without context are just that - numbers. It's
| the context that makes it information. GPS coordinates by
| itself are the same, they're just numbers, but by attaching
| meaning to them you may make them dangerous or illegal to
| publish. And sometimes enough meaning is "don't let anyone know
| it" - the rest can be gathered from the context and other data.
| dTal wrote:
| 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
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Thanks, that was an interesting read! It does of course raise
| interesting questions about a nefarious powerful government
| that wants to get rid of someone for "endangering national
| security". Taking the example of sensitive GPS coordinates, I
| can easily come up with an a way to encode a pair of
| coordinates (with 10m precision) in 5 bytes, or 40 bits. And
| that's no longer a number where probability is so much on
| your side. Unscrupulous government agents have a decent
| chance at finding those 5 bytes in the dump of your
| 1-terabyte drive!
|
| I guess the counterpoint here is, a government that wanted to
| put you behind bars by justifying it with 5 random bytes
| would have no problems with fabricating some much stronger
| evidence against you instead.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I don't know about "reasonable", but much smaller numbers
| have, in practice, been banned in various contexts by legal
| authorities (tl;dr 2 to 11 bits).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number#Other_examples
| dTal wrote:
| ...I don't think it's _quite_ fair to characterize the
| search term "4" as 2-bits of information, since it's
| possible to put any text in a search box, not just numbers.
| Although it's certainly not 128 bits either!
| jasode wrote:
| 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
| about Shakespeare's Hamlet that when SHA-1 hashed, it gives you
| that same information? Yes, it would be very computationally
| intensive to generate a plausible literary text but it could be
| done. Or one embeds Bill Gates credit-card number as
| "transactions amounts" on Bitcoin blockchain.
|
| The theme is the same: find a _" legitimate"_ information channel
| to transmit illegitimate data. This then allows the philosophical
| arguments about information:
|
| - How can commentary about Shakespeare be _illegal_? It 's
| education!
|
| - How can you censor transactions on the bitcoin blockchain?
| There are already 100,000+ copies of it on nodes around the
| globe! And so on...
| simonh wrote:
| The number itself is not enough to have the encoded
| information, you also need the details of the encoding/decoding
| scheme. So if you had this 'commentary on Shakespear' by itself
| it's no more interesting than if you had an encrypted copy of
| Bill's credit card number but not the password to unencrypt it.
| Having that on a T-Shirt doesn't seem quite so outrageous
| though.
|
| However if you have, or circulate this number along with an
| implementation of the decoding algorithm, as a reader, then
| you're actually circulating the credit card number itself in a
| much more direct way. Yes, I know they also publish the
| unpacking algorithms, but If I walked round with a T-shirt with
| the encoded file on the front, and the decoding program on the
| back, that's clearly a much more direct and obvious
| transgression.
|
| The joke about these illegal primes is that by themselves they
| seem innocuous, they're just seemingly meaningless numbers, but
| put the two halves of the puzzle together and the problem
| becomes a lot clearer. Handing out an unreadable, encrypted,
| encoded number with the latest Marvel movie in it but no way to
| play it seems harmless, hand it out with a bundled video player
| as well and that's a problem. Now it's a viewable movie and
| that's a different kettle of fish.
|
| A friend of mine got very excited when we were CS students
| because he found a way to theoretically 'encrypt and compress'
| data to extremely small sizes, until I pointed out the binary
| compression key would end up being vastly bigger than the
| 'compressed' file. Basically he was just 'sucking' the
| complexity out of the data file and putting it in the key.
| These numbers are a bit like that, a large amount of the
| information in the 'encoded' content is actually sequestered in
| the unpacking algorithm.
|
| With the right 'decoding scheme' the number 5 is an encoded
| copy of Infinity War. Wow, 5 is now an illegal prime!
| CivBase wrote:
| It would be much easier to create a "free speech flag" instead.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
| jasode wrote:
| I'm replying to myself to address some of the skeptical
| comments about my scenario because I didn't make it clear what
| I was trying to communicate.
|
| I was trying to emphasize the people _sharing_ the legitimate
| data and _not_ the person who generated it from illegal data.
|
| For example, the SHA256( _" Hamlet was a prince in Denmark."_)=
| ="4461565240549538f8888f5ac829800a79763479f28418dec7a13087a3e0d
| 2a8".
|
| Let's say the first 16 hex digits ( _" 4461565240549538"_) is
| an "illegal number" ... e.g. somebody's credit-card or
| whatever.
|
| Yes, the _intent_ of starting with "4461565240549538" and
| using brute force to eventually find some a plausible sounding
| sentence that creates a hash with that 16-digit number can be
| prosecuted. Likewise, you can't just XOR a Blu-Ray mp4 file
| with digits of pi and claim "it's just a random number" to be
| immune from copyright laws.
|
| I'm talking about the people _downstream_ that do something
| like this by _sharing_ on reddit, Twitter, etc:
|
| - I ran across some Shakespeare trivia: _" Hamlet was a prince
| in Denmark."_ I don't want anybody to hash it. I just thought
| that was _interesting_ to know.
|
| - Streisand Effect[1] the above tweet or forum post
|
| - now everyone debates : How can the sentence _" Hamlet was a
| prince in Denmark."_ -- be _illegal_?!? It 's a factoid about a
| play that you can't remove from everyone's brain! We're now
| _past the point_ of the criminal who brute forced the illegal
| data to publish it. I 'm talking about the non-criminals
| sharing it. That's the information hack: Shift the illegal data
| into the realm of the legal data.
|
| Maybe that hack hasn't been fully tested in courts but it
| seemed to work if we look at the DeCSS code _repackaged as an
| interesting prime number_. Neither Chris Caldwell and Phil
| Carmody have been put in jail.
|
| It can also be especially effective if the would-be criminal
| who generated _interesting hashes or prime numbers_ did it
| _anonymously_ such as Satoshi Nakamoto 's generation of the
| bitcoin genesis block. There's now no obvious person to
| prosecute.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
| upofadown wrote:
| >...what if we wrote a text commentary about Shakespeare's
| Hamlet that when SHA-1 hashed, it gives you that same
| information?
|
| That would imply that it would be practical to create a
| document that hashes to a specified value. The SHA-1 pre-image
| resistance would prevent that.
| jasode wrote:
| _> The SHA-1 pre-image resistance would prevent that._
|
| No, I'm talking about computing something much less ambitious
| than solving pre-image resistance.
|
| Consider the example SHA-1 hash[1]: SHA1("")
| gives hexadecimal: da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709
| gives Base64 binary to ASCII text encoding:
| 2jmj7l5rSw0yVb/vlWAYkK/YBwk=
|
| Embedded in that hex is "95601890" ... which could be
| somebody's driver's license number. Now that the number is
| _publicly visible_ via some _legitimate purpose_ other than
| illegally publishing drivers license numbers, we can then
| argue _" How can a SHA-1 of a empty string illegal?!?"_
|
| It's a similar concept to creating "vanity" public hashes for
| Tor or bitcoin addresses or finding a hash that has a certain
| number of leading zeros in "proof of work". Embedding
| arbitrary illegal information that way is more
| computationally feasible with brute force than perfect pre-
| image attacks.
|
| The underlying idea of the hack is the same : Find some way
| to make illegal data _be interpreted in a totally different
| way that _is_ legal_. It 's very hard to do for large amounts
| of information such as 9 GB mp4 rip of a Blu-ray disc -- but
| easier for small amounts of information... such as the DeCSS
| C source code converted to an "interesting" prime number.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1#Example_hashes
| uuidgen wrote:
| "95601890" is just an arbitrary number, the same as any
| other.
|
| Additional metadata, such as "it's a driver's license
| number", "it relates to person X" gives it context and
| makes it information. 4037 is a bank pin code for millions
| of people, but as long as you don't combine it with a
| person it's just a 4 digit number. When you combine it it
| becomes information protected in many countries.
| lupire wrote:
| The law doesn't have exceptions for "a part of of happens
| to look like something legal"
| tantalor wrote:
| https://shattered.io/
| GuB-42 wrote:
| This is a collision attack, much weaker than pre-image. It
| means that you can make two different texts with the same
| hash, but you can't create a text that matches a specific
| hash.
|
| Even MD5 is safe from a pre-image attack, it means, for
| example, that it is safe to use for storing passwords (but
| not recommended for other reasons).
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| uuidgen wrote:
| If you're the only person that knows a particular sequence of
| letters or numbers you own it.
|
| If you remove all knowledge of that information you destroy
| it. And by "all knowledge" I mean every known way to generate
| it, not just a simple representation.
|
| There is nothing special among any single number in 160 byte
| string, but it contains all SMS ever sent. Some of those
| messages are of special interest to some people.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Illegality is an artificial concept.
|
| There is no right and wrong in this world; there are only
| parties with enough power to enforce their will upon others.
| Some of those parties believe that what they do serves some
| public interest.
| lupire wrote:
| Law is an entirely artificial concept. That's the whole point
| of it.
| grishka wrote:
| Laws only work when the majority of people is on board with
| them, and there's a misbehaving minority against which
| they're enforced. It's most certainly not the case with the
| copyright law, at least in its current form. Or, for that
| matter, any other oppressive laws that aim to manipulate
| people through fear into doing (or not doing) something
| elites want.
| privacylawthrow wrote:
| 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.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Sometimes the law cares about intent.
|
| For copyright, it really doesn't. Hence Disney threatening to
| sue daycares for having Disney character murals on their
| walls.
|
| While we have since had the four factors of fair use
| introduced, it still doesn't care about intent; it cares
| about how the work is used/transformed, but that's different
| than intent.
| snappieT wrote:
| 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.
| lostcolony wrote:
| 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
| where you're clearly not economically benefiting), and to
| choose to do it anyway.
|
| Hence why copyright law doesn't take intent into account;
| 'ignorance of the law is not a defense'.
| drdeca wrote:
| 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.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| They intended to make referential work to characters in
| our modern common culture/mythology, as people have done
| since time immemorial. Some rent-seekers merely think
| they get to own ideas now.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _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._
|
| The strange matter is that in the U.S.A., _mens rea_ is an
| element of the crime of sharing and possessing child
| pornography, meaning that one can only be convicted if one
| knew, or could reasonably be expected to know the actor was
| under a certain age, but this is not the case for actual
| sexual intercourse with a minor, where one is criminally
| liable if one could not be expected to know.
|
| In most jurisdictions, _mens rea_ is an element of both.
| sorokod wrote:
| Presumably applying the "Right to be forgotten" to data encoded
| on the blockchain will wreak havoc on it's immutability aspect.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| I think this is less a philosophical argument than a legal one.
| If a court can prove that you explicitly owned the illegal data
| in its raw format, and used that to generate something (even if
| it has secondary value), they should be free to prosecute in my
| opinion. That includes searching through and highlighting data
| that already exists in the wild such as large prime numbers.
| Presumably showing statistics of how often random data would
| decode to someone's credit card number would prove this beyond
| reasonable doubt.
|
| The fact all data exists 'in nature' - while interesting, is
| not something I think should override the intent of data laws.
| lupire wrote:
| It's really amazing how many experts and professionals in
| _information technology_ seem to understand _what information
| is_ less well than stodgy old lawyers and politicians.
| dTal wrote:
| Yes. A commentary on Shakespeare that just _happens_ to hash
| to Bill Gates ' personal details is so monumentally unlikely
| to occur by accident that its existence constitutes proof of
| intent beyond all reasonable doubt. Disingenuously asserting
| that "it's education!" is a bit like the mafia boss asserting
| that no, the front business _really is_ a laundromat.
|
| https://qntm.org/number
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(page generated 2021-04-12 23:02 UTC)