Slashdot Mirror
Illegal Prime Number Unzips to DeCSS
Bob9113 writes: "A person named Phil Carmody has found a very interesting prime number. When converted to hexadecimal, the result is a gzip that contains a DeCSS implementation. I've posted a short bit of Java
here that takes the prime as a command line parameter and dumps the result to standard out if you want to test it." Very clever, I just wish the background on that page wasn't headache inducing.
Yes, it was funny at the beginning, with poems, MP3 songs and everything. But now it's getting quite dull. Or is anybody really seriously believing these cute little stunts will change anything about the legality of DeCSS? No, nobody can be that naive.
Using the defintion "The only numbers that divide it are 1 and itself" then 1 is most certainly a prime, the definition says nothing about its two divisors being distinct.
The best reason why 1 is not considered prime is so that the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic can be stated elegantly. The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic is that every natural number has a unique prime factorization. If 1 were prime that factorization would not be unique. But if you're not into hardcore math then you can call 1 whatever the heck you want since everybody will still know what you talking about.
Now can someone please encode the MP3 version of Metallica's latest hit into a prime number?
I never post under my nickname. WHat's the point? Karma's useless and and you're just gonna be ridiculed by the morons who moderate this.
Like evrything, moderation should be done in moderation.
If we have atomic resolution measurements, we could optimistically measure with an accuracy of 1E-10m. This corresponds to 2^-33 m, and thus we could only have 33 bits. However, if we have an accuracy of a Planck-length, (1.6E-35 m) we get a whopping 119 bits. On the other hand, if the aliens instead would make for each '1' with a grid spacing of a planck length, they would fit in 6E25 TB/m. Maybe that would take a while, though.
Please don't spoil the fun of this by posting logical explanations.
Yeah, true. When I told my mom that there's a prime number that gzip converts to DeCSS source, she immediately cried out: "Then DeCSS can't be illegal".
Seriously, though, the creativity that's being directed at making a mockery of the DMCA, while not "productive" in the strictest sense of the word, serves at least two important functions:
1. DMCArt, the more diverse and unrelated it becomes, has a greater liklihood of drawing attention to itself outside the already growing community who know about the DMCA and why it is evil.
At first, it was a widely distributed piece of illegal code but it had a limited audience and was a very abstract concept. Then somebody sang about it, and made it (while still impenitrable to the average American) a little catchy. I may even have memorized the song accidentally, making my brain illegal. Now people are creating new and more fascinating "interpretations" of DeCSS (almost none of them functionally equivalent to our hero, mind you) each possibly more interesting to another segment of society than the last. Soon, if we're lucky, you'll see CSSDescramble spraypainted on boxcars, and sold to unsuspecting patrons at galleries, and encoded in a pattern of bricks at the base of the latest high rise. That's when you'll know that the DMCA has finally been grepped by America. If people didn't direct their creative juices at this, it would be an unapproachable "Washington thing" (like "insurance,", right Mr. President?).
2. It keeps people like me from rotting their brain with television for a while, and instead learning more about our craft. That prime number guy likes numbers, so he sits himself down and keeps his tool sharp by finding his own way to say "fuck you" to the DMCA. The guy who wrote the song has a band, and it damn well served a purpose for him beyond mocking the movie studio cabal. So it's not just a noble, necessary thing to criticize the DMCA with art, it's a selfish thing.
And those are the best things to do of all.
Wrong.
1 .. .
0.101001000100001000001000000100000001000000000
That isn't rational, but it doesn't contain the number 2 in it anywhere.
Not all irrational numbers contain every arbitrary sequence of digits.
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Who ever said math wasn't useful for anything in the real world? :)
</sarcasm>
Well it should be noted that 31337 is prime, but its not illegal, yet.
So what? Any tiny character difference is going to result in a different subset of primes that can be reduced to the original source code.
Posted by McDoobie:
;-p
I'm not a computer guru by any stretch of the imagination, but the concept being laid out here seems like it might work well as a new sort of compression algorithm. i.e. One could theoretically(I suppose) encode entire files into one simple number. Whether that number would have to prime or not, I'm not sure. But it seems like a novel concept.
Of course, the fact that I'm still working my way through H.S. Math could indicate that I dont have the slightest clue what I'm talking about.
So, if I am way off base here, let me know, and I'll shut up.
McDoobie
Posted by ryanflynn:
Aw jeez. I usually just skip any posts that use the word(?) 'axiomatic'
Posted by damiam:
According to Time magazine from a few months ago, Canada doesn't have the same laws requiring that all toilets be low-flow.
I think the odds are about 1 in 1400 (1 in log(x))
Will this number now be a prime suspect?
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ticks = jiffies;
while (ticks == jiffies);
ticks = jiffies;
Have you read my journal today?
You should probably read the article that the person you're responding to referenced.
Is that even allowed? After all, you created a copy in your brain matter without the proper authorization from the copyright holder. Maybe fair use applies though.
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Isn't this whole First Amendment right of free speech thing getting old? I'm getting bored with the whole thing. It has surpassed my attention span. The entertainment cartel can buy laws that trample any of our fundamental liberties so long as they continue to churn out those great blockbusters that don't commit the sin of boring me.
Anybody got one which decodes to the Scientology OT secret documents?
Possibly even further !
;)
Find a Mersenne prime that encodes it
Possibly such a prime can exist where the power is shorter than the current prime.
That should put those damn CPUs to use...
I think you misunderstood.
In the interval 1...n there is a finite number of primes.
Therefore, you can instead of writing down a large prime P, you can write down which number of prime it is in the sequence 1...P.
Clearly you haven't considered that anything can be encoded (using prime numbers+gzip, plain gzip, rot-13, whichever encoding you fancy)
This encoding is no different from any other decoding: It changes information from one representation to another. This is not new - only this particular encoding is new, but the idea of encoding is certainly not new.
Ok, the rest here is speculation:
Clearly, gzipping some piece of software does not change the licensing of that software. So, what if I work with numerical simulations and purely by chance my plasma physics data set can be gunzipped into a full distribution of [insert some proprietary software here] ?
I guess that would be ok, because clearly this happened by chance and I never intended to actually gunzip my data set.
Likewise, if your key-exchange code by chance generates a prime that just happens to encode some piece of IP, it should be hard for anyone to sue you.
On the other hand, encoding the "original" for the purpose of distributing it in some alternative representation has always been illegal. gzipping IP doesn't make it legal, neither does encoding it into a prime number after it's gzipped.
But this is a funny problem ! It puts a new angle on "Intellectual Poverty".
You're right that anything could be encoded into a prime number (with a suitable prime->original conversion).
But using some prime->original decoder is no different from say, gunzip. It's decoding of information in on form back to it's "original" form.
So no, making copies of Win2K is not legal wether it's gzipped or encoded into a prime.
And distributing DeCSS as a prime number (or gzipped) doesn't change the legality either.
Subtracting 1 from the number then distributing that number just adds another layer on your decoder, it doesn't change what you're doing. gzipping something twice doesn't remove the licensing restrictions either.
However, this is interesting because it puts a new angle on the flawed notion of "Intellectual Property" (or, Intellectual Poverty as I like to call it, because that must be what we suffer from if we restrict other's access to ideas that are indeed just mathematics in some form or another).
Just wait. You haven't seen encoding all your bases in prime numbers yet...
RIAA Petitions Congress To Ban Number Theory
Mathematicians Declared "Enemy of Intellectual Property (and the American Way)"
Rambus Patents Prime Numbers
Any guesses about which one you'll see first? :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The fact of the matter is that every piece of digital information is nothing but a sting of digits.
Right.
This one is interesting in that the number happens to be prime.
The number happens to compress down to a number that can be turned into a prime by adding some trailing digits. This is probably (but not proven AFAIK) possible for any number; what's interesting is that someone tried to do so and was successful.
My question for a lawyer is this; does Microsoft have legal copyright on some numbers?
I'm not a lawyer, but the answer is obviously yes: every piece of Microsoft software can be encoded as a (usually multimillion digit) number. Sending that number to someone else would violate copyright law.
If so, do they also own every number that can be derived mathematically from them?
No; just because they have a copyright on n doesn't mean they own n - n = 0 or n / n = 1, Onion article to the contrary.
You might say they own every number that has to be derived mathematically from them; i.e. gzipping the file, turning it into a prime number, etc. doesn't remove the copyright protection. On the other hand, you could distribute a file containing the first 10^1500 integers, and as long as you didn't also distribute a way of discerning which integers were copyrighted your act should be useless but legal.
Of course, I'm one of those folks who thinks that the War on Drugs and DMCA are unconstitutional, so if you're actually considering brushing up against the law you should ignore everything I say.
But if so, nobody has proved it for Pi or e, at least. I don't know if it's been proven for "starting sequences" of prime numbers.
Beware of two things you're doing here: you're imagining that primes, Pi, and e are all sequences of "random" digits. They certainly look that way, but it isn't true, and some of that non-randomness may, for example, prevent a particular number from ever appearing in the digit sequence. Secondly, you're trying to make a mathematical argument from "common sense" rather than from axioms and logic. That doesn't work as often as you'd wish it would; common sense sucks.
How about saying "nth prime that is this long"?
As in "1400,123456"? How many 1400 digit primes exist?
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
You're missing the point. Your car _has_ a number. Your car isn't a number. I am not stealing your car by emailing my friend your VIN. Ideas _can't_ be owned. That's all there is to it. The basis of copyright law even says that copyright is a gift of the public to the author for the purposes of advancing the useful arts, not a mandate of nature like personal property. The reason that ideas/nonmaterial things can't be owned is that the transfer of copies does no direct harm to the original owner.
Engineering and the Ultimate
At least one version of the story can be found in Martin Gardner's "Aha! Gotcha!" (ISBN: 0716713616), 1982.
Although for this particular story, you pretty much covered it. I've always liked that one though, impossible though it is.
You know, I might just buy Titanic if you did that.
No. Only when you write it down in hex and then gunzip it.
The MPAA will either have to ban this prime number, ban gzip, or ban anyone from telling people that the number is deCSS.
More precisely: the number itself is harmless. The method to go from that number to deCSS is not.
Naw.. that was some spam organisation.
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Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
1 is neither a prime nor is it a composite. Same goes for zero.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Dont we get a Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy problem here?
The algorithm to decode the ratio stored in the Crystal Rod must be extremely complex. Obviously the Alien in this case must then be the other part of the encoding/decoding machine.
infinity consisting of numbers ending with two is the exact same as infinity which is divisible by 1/16. it is infinite.
I suppose you could do the same thing with this number and division (multiply this number by your favorite number or perform some other mathematical operation on it, so it could then be divided back) but the numbers you'd get would start to become awfully unwieldy.
They couldn't trademark '80486' because it's a part number, and any other manufacturer could also call their chip an '80486'. Just like different word-processor makers can come out with version 7.0 at the same time.
Actually the original post was closer. You cannot trademark or copyright letters or numbers in the U.S. This was settled back in the '80's by a case (cases?) involving Zilog.
Remember Zilog, makers of the fine Z-80 microprocessor? Well, they had this Z-80, used in a bunch of CP/M machines of the time, like the TRS-80. Anyway, to protect the name of their product, they essentially attempted to sue everyone on the planet who had ever used the letter "Z". They lost.
End of history lesson.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
That's pretty funny. Maybe someday you'll have the balls to put a name to your words.
So for example, "P" isn't a registered trademark of Parsons in computer systems?
Yes, shitbag, that's exactly what I'm saying. You cannot trademark a letter, even the letter "P", even if you're Parsons Technology. What Parsons has registered is a trademark for their particular stylized design, incorporating the letter "P". So if I want to call my computer company "P Computers" or even "P Software", then there's nothing they can do about it. Now, were I to call my company "P Technology" and use a "P" logo that was suspiciously similar to theirs, like the one in their trademark record (serial #74179529 registration #1734490, which you can find by searching TESS), which by the way clearly indicates that it is for "words, letters and/or numbers IN STYLIZED FORM", THEN they might have a case of infringement.
If you don't think so, then let me announce that I am applying for a trademark on the letter "E", with respect to its use in all correspondence, electronic or otherwise, to protect my forthcoming product, named "E-Mailer". But I'll license it to anyone who wants to use "E", for the low, low fee of $0.50 per occurrence. Cash only, please.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
67, 109, 100, 114, 84, 97, 99, 111, 32, 109, 111, 108, 101, 115, 116, 115, 32, 98, 97, 98, 121, 32, 115, 101, 97, 108, 115, 33
(I don't have a bigint package handy to shift 'em all into an int)
Decode in ascii and you get "CmdrTaco molests baby seals!". Hey, they're just numbers, so I guess a forged document like a police record rap sheet showing all sorts of other illegal perversions he engages in, discreetly slipped to all his friends, wouldn't be libel as long as I gzipped it.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
IIRC, arithmetic encoding results in a number between 0 and 1, and allows encoding of an arbitrary amount of data.
See The Data Compression Book - I haven't got a copy to hand to check.
So the only issue is the resolution of the mark on the rod.
Tim
Nope. I also live in a quite predominantly Slavic community...
There are already a few "forbidden numbers"
Note the Orthodoxes are against many countings and IDs because in some of them may appear the idoneous "666".
13 floor is non-existent in some places with predominant anglo-saxon population
2 is also for some cultures a "forbidden" or "bad" number. Btw never give two flowers to a girl from slavic culture.
Some think that the square root of two and pi were "demonic" numbers for Pitagorics, a mysthical sect of Antiquity and predecessors of many Christian ideas and with some love to play maths. The fact of the existence of real numbers was felt as a "fault" in the building of the Universe... Btw Pitagorics were responsible for the advent of prime numbers.
But then ALL numbers can be relatively short.
1 is not a prime number. A prime number is a number that has *two* factors, itself an 1. 1 only has one factor, and so does not qualify.
Of course, does it really matter?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Wouldn't zero have an infinite number of factors? After all, you can divide zero by anything (except zero) and get no remainder.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Those sentences don't specify order. The first sentence simply says that he found a number, and it doesn't say how. (Your idea as to his process would qualify as "found", IMO.) The second sentence simply explains what the prime number is.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, yeah, that's probably what happened, but so what?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Of course, a few terabytes of digits would exceed the resolution of any atomic matter, but the idea was there.
No, it depends on how long the rod is.
As a matter of fact, it is. The source code to any program (including closed-source programs) is in reality a string of bytes, which is the same as a (very very large) number. And the transmission of that number is restricted by the gov't.
I'm not particularly happy about it, either.
-Jeremy
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Not to mention that the length of your program will depend on what concepts/keywords are present in the language itself. As a stupid example, suppose C came with a decss keyword built in to the compiler. Then I could write a DeCSS decoder in just one line of code!
void main() {decss;}
But what does that prove?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You are correct that the reasoning in my statement, as I said it, was wrong.
However, I believe it to be true that, given a sequence of numbers (in any base), you can find a prime number that begins with that sequence. That there are an infinite number of primes suggests, but does not prove, that this is the case.
Likewise, that Pi and e are transendental does not prove that they contain any given finite sequence of digits somewhere, but I believe it is true. (It may, in fact, be a property of transendental numbers, but I couldn't find it in a quick Google scan of the topic.)
This is very easy.
If you want to find something in a prime number, you figure out what you're looking for--in this case, the gziped code. You then search for prime numbers that start with those digits. Since there are an infinite number of prime numbers, you will always be able to find one (given enough time).
You could also find DeCSS gzipped in a section of Pi or e, based on similar ideas.
Barbie should be thrilled!
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
No string that begins with one or more zeroes can be encoded this way, so no prime number begins with one or more zeroes when written the normal decimal form (for that matter, no integer other than 0 begins with a zero when written this way).
I do not know if every finite string of digits can be found in e or pi, but I can show it is not true that every finite string of digits can be found in every irrational number (although the original author did not claim that). Consider the irrational number where the Nth decimal digit to the right of the decimal point is 1 if the N is a perfect square and 0 if not. That is:
1.10010000100000010...That number is irrational, and no string of digits containing, say, a "2" every appears in it.
You forget the DeCSS as a problem is mainly a USofA legal issue, other developed countries see things differently.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Using the much shorter efdtt.c, there's another illegal prime number.
Inspired by Phil's effort, a prime number encoding of the source of efdtt.c has been contributed by Charles M. Hannum.
This is so incredibly cool. I'd be interested in some more details on just how you run a search for a prime number of this type. They didn't just base16 it and go, wow, that was a prime. Tell us more!
Even though you're probably a troll, i'll address this. Your car may have a VIN number, but you don't own that number. I can publish that number, and that doesn't mean i'm stealing it from you.
Copyrighting a number may make sense: the task of -finding- the number that happens to be the source to win2000 is very very difficult for mankind to do. First mankind has to write Win2000. To compensate Microsoft for undertaking this task, the government gives them temporary rights to control the distribution of this number. While i think this time period should be about five years instead of several dozen, it makes sense.
But to say that someone else cannot distribute a number which THEY have undertaken the task of finding makes no sense.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Redundant. It says this right there in the link.
The good geek karma dictated that this number should be a prime and the rest is now the history
Uninformed. You obviously were in such a hurry to post your message that you didn't actually follow the link, where it clearly explains the formula he used to turn the code into a prime:
First Carmody took the original anonymous version of the DeCSS C-code and gzip'ed it... By Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progression, we know that for each fixed integer b relatively prime to k, there are infinitely many primes ak+b. For technical reasons, if we choose a to be a power of 256 larger than b, the resulting number can still be unzipped to get the original file. This means there are infinitely many prime numbers which yield the same code. These include: k*256^2+2083 and k*256^211+99.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Well.. I prefer being precise. The way /. reported is misleading :)
e w-Allies.html Looks like Serbs and NATO are now allies?! Our gov. has lied to us again.
And now for something completely different...
Let me digress a bit... I checked your homepage and I agree 100% with what you said right here: http://www.uwm.edu/People/mikeash/kosovo.html
It's amazing how now things changed. Check this link: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Kosovo-N
I think that this passage from 1984 sums it all up the best:
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the
speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters,
the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of
trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the
caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming
of guns -- after six days of this, when the great orgasm was
quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had
boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got
their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be
publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would
unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at just this moment
it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war
with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an
ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had
taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness
and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the
enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the
central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was
night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly
floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people,
including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the
uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of
the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long
arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks
straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin
figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end
of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His
voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless
catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,
rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying
propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost
impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and
then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd
boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild
beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of
throats. The most savage yells of all came from the
schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps
twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and
a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He
unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing
altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he
was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without
words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a
tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the
square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the
wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein
had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters
were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled
A person named Phil Carmody has found a very interesting prime number. When converted to hexadecimal, the result is a gzip that contains a DeCSS implementation.
The odds of this happening in this order are slim to none. If you believe in this chain of the evenets I have some stock to sell you. What really happened was most certainly the reverse. He took gzip that contained DeCSS, converted it to hex and analyzed the number. The good geek karma dictated that this number should be a prime and the rest is now the history =)
> Some think that the square root of two and pi were "demonic" numbers for Pitagorics, a mysthical sect of Antiquity and predecessors of many Christian ideas and with some love to play maths. The fact of the existence of real numbers was felt as a "fault" in the building of the Universe... Btw Pitagorics were responsible for the advent of prime numbers.
FWIW, one of the oldest known conspiracy theories claims that Pythagoras was drowned by his own followers in their outrage at his discovery of irrational numbers.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's not that simple.
They couldn't trademark '80486' because it's a part number, and any other manufacturer could also call their chip an '80486'. Just like different word-processor makers can come out with version 7.0 at the same time.
And as any type of data can be converted to 'just a number'.... this won't hold up. It's still decss, just encoded and padded out to a prime.
This can be persuaive because it shows a way to use a computer program (gzip) to circumvent CSS when that program was clearly never intended as a circumvention method in the first place. This is an attack on DMCA in the broad, rather than on CSS and MPAA in particular.
as i recall, numbers alone can never be considered intellectual property. that's what bit intel in the ass with the 486. all the companies that made knockoffs were calling them 486's, diluting the namespace. so intel came out with "pentium" to solve that problem.
the question now is whether the courts would consider this just a number, or an encoding of the decss data into a number.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
You need the keys for it to work. same for the RSA program.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Still wickedly cool though...
Of course, you can have even more fun with numbers: don't tell the RIAA, but PI and e contains all their past, current and future songs aswell as all copyrighted material that has or will ever exist in any format you wish. Guess PI should be next on their hitlist.
-henrik
Studying math in Switzerland and once again referring to university's material:
/.ed server ;-)
1 is NOT prime!
(see e.g. "Kleine Enzyklopädie Mathematik", p. 24, Verlag Harri Deutsch, Frankfurt, 1984)
Apart from that little question, I still have to verify the claim deposited on that
Don't conform!
IkKampfProfessor75
-bromo
Fiat Lux.
Now who are they going to sue? God?
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Pretend there is some witty statement here.
But wouldn't that number be useless unless you had a table of all 12345... numbers, or else replicated all the computational work yourself?
It depends on your definition of itself. In this case "itself" happens to be one. In any explination of determining if a number is prime I have never seen it written that the two numbers (itself and one) have to be different. So I think one happens to be prime.
Actually. Why isn't it written in hex in the first place? Just because average Joe mostly uses decimal numbers, doesn't make hexadecimal any less of a number This leaves the fact that the ONLY thing that makes this decss, is gunzip'ing it. Which also means that as the number itself may not be illegal, and gunzip predates CSS by several years. Neither gunzip or the number may be illegal. Can the ACT of gunzipping it be illegal, knowing that the result is DeCSS? Can TELLING people that the number is DeCSS be illegal? It's not in my country anyway...
The last four bytes of a gzip file contain the uncompressed size of the stored file. Unfortunately, the page seems to be /.ted, so I can't check that.
Say... Does this mean that there is a prime number than when un-gzipped contains the OT-III text?
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Then there's 9892454959483. This one is the source code for Microsoft Word. In addition to being "copyrighted," this one is a trade secret. That means if you take this number from Microsoft and give it to anyone else you can be punished. Lastly, there's 588832161316. It doesn't do anything, it's just the square of 767354. As far as I know, it isn't owned by anybody under any of these rubrics. Yet.
When I first read this I laughed at the concept of a stream of numbers being copyrightable. But that is of course the current case. Of course it would be even more ridiculous that a naturally-occuring prime would be so subversive, wouldn't it?
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Judge Sipowitz ordered an injunction against anyone in the United State to use any prime numbers in the following areas.
- Age
- Math Class
- Slashdot UIDs
- Programming
Judge Sipowitz was then sued by CmdrTaco because of his slashdot uid. CmdrTaco is also suing for emotional damages...
(I asked a bunch of people on IRC if 1 was a prime number. I got lot of yes and no responses. Then again turning to IRC for help? I must be crazy.)
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Check out my blackbox styles
Why would Americans go across the border to get Canadian toilets?
Hands in my pocket
Not even close: 1/x is between 0 and 1 for all x > 1. More efficient schemes are of course possible.
Clearly! Does this number have 216 digits? No, didn't think so.
But if it did, it wouldn't be the Catholic Church who gave a damn, it would be Wall Street bastards and Jewish rabbis.
To newbie moderators: If you haven't seen the film, at least ask somebody who has lest you mod me down.
< tofuhead >
--
It is still the dark of night.
The fact of the matter is that every piece of digital information is nothing but a sting of digits.
This one is interesting in that the number happens to be prime.
(Is this a mathematical trick? If not how on earth did the author make this discovery?)
My question for a lawyer is this; does Microsoft have legal copyright on some numbers?
If so, do they also own every number that can be derived mathematically from them?
If not, can we legally store any copyrighted files with say 1 subtracted from the number?
(Think of it as insecure encryption with a trivial key and algorithm.)
And finally if this act would be illegal, then surely as a copyright holder I own rights to all digital data as you can mathematically transform between any two numbers without much difficulty.
Or else, somebody could just say: Hey, look at the sequence of digits of pi starting at mumble mumble bazillions mumble mumble and ending 137142 characters later... and he would be in the clear, because Pi exists naturally, and just "happens" to contain the source code of DeCSS at that place. Truth is, by linking to that place, you revealed the code, which formerly wasn't distinguished from the zillion other code-snippets also contained in Pi...
George Orwell died on January 21, 1950. Paragraph 12 of the UK's Copyright Act 1998 states that "Copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work expires at the end of the period of 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author dies".
Doesn't that mean that 1984 is out of copyright?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
What if the number turned out to be .253....0000? How would trailing zeroes not be lost?
The licensing terms on Prime Curios! are pretty standard, preventing copying, for one. I realized that the prime number is based on the DeCSS source code, and therefore protected by the GPL.
...Which brings up an interesting question... can a _number_ be GPL'd? What about patented? This scheme allows basically any computer program to be represented as a number, and if you want a prime all you have to do is append trailing garbage (ignored by gzip) until the number is prime.
Rewrite it in assembler. You're guarenteed to get an improvement.
Exactly as much effort is "wasted" on cynicism as there is on creativity and discovery.
turns into a positive affirmation of human action and generally makes the world a better place:
... but I'm not one to argue that either is more valuable than the other... I value them both. Your cynicism, while irritating and unfounded, serves a purpose too, my child.
DMCArt is the application of the human mind, as much as advertising, architecture, fornication, or whatever, and is also an explicit rejection of intellectual control by governing bodies or corporate beings--a double whammy if you ask me. Enjoy your aimless cynical life, and I will enjoy my aimless and creative one.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
So either God uses Linux, or maybe the MPAA is satanic after all, and he built DeCSS into the universe to make it crumble..
BTW, doesn't the MPAA's address have the number 666 in it? Or am I thinking of another corp.?
--Never trust a tech who tattoes his IP to his arm, especially if its DHCP.
Right, I was trying to remember this formula after I posted and realized that the savings would not be so great. After you get past 10 digits or so, the distribution of primes is relatively flat/even. This post implys at out at N = 10^1400, primes are still about 1000 apart. So there's no real savings.
:)
:)
So mod this guy up and my original post down..
We need "Mathdot", then I wouldn't have gotten a 5 so quickly..
Yup, B.Sc in Math makes the math lingo flow freely. The Primes (and the rationals, naturals, integers, evens, odds) are countably infinite.
Things like the reals (decimal numbers) are NOT countably infinite.
In blogan's favor though. This the textbook proof that the set of primes are infinite...
Here's the REAL trick though. People have been talking about countable mersienne (sp!!!) primes, etc.
Now we just need the set of "illegal primes"! Since they're a subset of primes, they're countable. Are they infinite?
Or perhaps there's some way to, in a STRICT MATHEMATICAL sense, create a corollary to this that is this specific prime is illegal, then all natural numbers N are illegal. Something a bit more formal than "If N is 'illegal' than 1 is illegal, qed".
Obviously the number of illegal numbers is infinite, since we can just take compounds of that prime. I don't think you could make an argument that a factor of an illegal number was illegal.
Can anyone come up with a smaller "illegal" number? Not actually post it, but methods to derive it? If it was fairly small, then all compounds of that number would be illegal
Prime numbers are countable. You in theory can be able to reduce this from 1400+ digits by saying it's the 12345...42153th prime (perhaps about 100 digits).
However determining this number would be (ludicrously) computionally expensive. Another quest for distributed.net?
Why work on the CSS code, why not the keys themselves? That would be more interesting.
>If so, do they also own every number that can be
>derived mathematically from them?
>
>If not, can we legally store any copyrighted
>files with say 1 subtracted from the number?
By subtracting one and then telling a person you have to add one to the number, you haven't changed the information content of the message. This is the case for any such transformation, be it gzip or PGP. Clearly the message is under the same copyright.
Anything can be encoded as a number, including the ASCII string 'McDonalds'.
Ken
1's not prime.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
> You're distributing a number. This is why copyright (and intellectual property) law doesn't make sense with digital data.
.mp3. If the number is not being "interpreted" as a song, then no restriction on the transaction should occur.
Actually they do, but not for the reason you mentioned.
Yes, you're right, ultimately it DOES come down to just a number, BUT, if an author puts time and effort into creating something, I believe, he should have a) the right to limit how his work is spread, and b) the right to be comensated.
We should be free to distribute any sequence of digital data as we want, as long as the number is being "interpreted in the proper usage."
i.e. I need to to send someone a long prime, which also happens to represenet some
Intellectual property rights are neither.
Very simply, 1 (along with -1) is neither prime nor composite.
+-1 is a unit.
Hm. That code looks a bit weird (I haven't tried actually running it, though). The second for loop's body ends with a semicolon, not a comma, and there are no braces to be seen. Still, the following (long) loop is indented. Should it really be? Not that it matters, since this is C and not Python, but if the point is to make it readable... Weird. I just ran it through GNU indent, and it seems to agree. I didn't look at the original (non-cleaned-up) code, either.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
If people go across the border to get canadian toilets, they certainly are going to do it for Canadian DVD software since it would just be an internet download away (a la PGPi). Hardware players that are multi/no zone would also be a popular export.
There's money to be made fella. Just get a really good attorney and some venture capital...
DB
If DECSS is legal in Canada/Mexico, why not bring the lawsuit up as an illegal trade practice under NAFTA?
Yes. This particular prime-encoding method is just another method of data encoding. It changes nothing: all digital data is encoded in binary code, essentially a number.
I'm also sure it's possible to find a research project/paper which has used a number which represents copyrighted/illegal data (maybe this number).
First, much less likely than you might think -- you have to understand the sheer scale of numbers. Certainly not this number. Accidentally coming up with this number is no more likely that running a random text generator until it produces the code you're looking for. In theory, this could happen, but in practice it never would. That's the flaw in your reasoning: the problems you bring up exist only on paper and would never actually come up.
So. Moral reasoning: I know of no real-world moral problems that might arise from encoding data in a slightly different way. If you know of an actual case, please bring it to my attention. Legal reasoning: this is simply a new data encoding and changes nothing. The person who published this obviously had distributing DeCSS as an intent, and therefore broke the law.
Hmm.. what was that Ayn Rand book called again? Anthem? I used to think the idea was preposterous.
(Of course, you'd have to exchange the goverment for the corporations and workers for consumers, but the idea is very much the same, if taken to an extreme.)
If your content is 'hello', and you encode that as 08, 05, 12, 12, 15, or 0805121215, then you can make it a number between 0 and 1 by simply prepending a decimal point: 0.08051212150000000...
[
There was a short science fiction story that went something like this.
Alien asks to view all Earth encyclopedias.
Alien encodes all the content as a single very massive integer.
Alien treats number as a fraction between 0 and 1.
Alien takes out a crystal rod, measures, and makes a single mark on it.
Alien goes home with the rod to decode later.
Of course, a few terabytes of digits would exceed the resolution of any atomic matter, but the idea was there.
[
There are infinite number of primes.
Take all the primes from 1..n (in your finite list) and multiply them. Add 1 to this. This number has to have factors since according to you, it's not prime. What are the factors of this number? Can't be any primes, because of the one we added. Therefore, this number must be prime. So we have a list of 1..n+1 primes. Multiply them together and add 1....
Whether something is wrong or not is completely orthogonal to whether or not it can be enforced. Yes, it is ridiculous to ban certain numbers or T-shirts but that doesn't make it ridiculous to ban DeCSS. You aren't proving anything by pointing out that DeCSS can be encoded in a prime number.
Mmmm.. Donuts
The smallest gziped binary (Linux ELF, i686) of dcss I was able to build is 1787 bytes long (the original was 3608). I used the 7-line C source that was posted a couple days ago (compiled with -s -O3 -mpentiumpro). I'm sure it's possible to do better... anybody tried?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The statements sperated by commas in the for loop are all contained within the for loop, and the whole statement is terminated by the ';'. That for loop could also be written(as it is in the code that was linked to above):
since the C compiler ignores all whitespace.
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Here here! I vote for simple C.
You do realize how silly that sounds, don't you?
Good luck finding arbitrary strings of digits in pi. I'm not sure anyone has proven that the infinite expansion of pi contains every decimal sequence, to begin with. Then, a counting argument shows that you can't transfer (in general) messages "smaller" than the original this way. You're probably better off sending the message encrypted with some reversible mathematical function.
Well, it's still at trial. Does the MPAA, EFF, or 2600 think it's getting old?
Maybe it deserves a category on slashdot so you can filter it out, though.
This is nonsense. Not to defend the MPAA, but 7 lines of C code (especially all packed up like that) is enough to represent some very complicated ideas. Given arbitrary-precision arithmetic, for instance, I'm sure you could implement RSA in 7 lines (you can certainly explain it in pseudocode). The RC4 algorithm is probably about 2 lines.
The brevity of an idea has nothing to do with how useful/important/'honest' it is. For that matter, it doesn't have much to do with how complicated it is. (Can you really explain CSS after "reading" that 7 line program?)
Next step I guess would be to convert the table to a prime number too. Then you could add this number and that number together and get the full DeCSS source as the sum of two primes.= \=\=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
I thought they were trying to be funny. Like: "You'd have to have a pretty big *rod* to do that!" Har har.
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
I had a post modded up and down like 8 times, settling eventually on 3.
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
I saw this on Kuro5in earlier today and I couldn't access it then. I guess I don't have a chance now :)
Stupid Cheap Guitars
--
EFF Member #11254
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Actually, this is trivial.
Take a portion of a piece by Shakespeare (or anything else copyrightless) the same length of your mp3. then XOR each byte of the Shakespeare text with the corresponding byte in the mp3 file and keep the result.
Now you have a string of glibberish that when xored with the piece by Shakespeare gives you the mp3.
Now write a simple program that does this and include the glibberish as a const. Done.
rmstar
In retrospect, it was only a matter of time 'till something like this happened. Programs are long numbers, and through this method you can now make any program a prime number.
Much better yet:
Theorem: For any circunvention method, there exists a prime number that encodes it.
So wellcome to the world a new class of numbers: Illegal Prime Numbers.
It's a great day for math!
cheers!
rmstar
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The formula he used to "find" this prime number can be found here:a l.html
http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/glossary/Illeg
Basically it says this:
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
You have too much faith in the american public.
Remember: this war will be won by the people who can most easily pander to the irrational stupidity of the non-geek population of this world (case in point: the USPTO shenanegans that have been going on). And, in that sense, since the folks at the MPAA, the RIAA, and any other TLAA (three letter acronym association) appear to have a general intellect that more closely matches that of our barely upright-walking, suit-wearing, pre-neanderthal brethren on this planet, they will win. we will lose. and i, my friend, will continue to break the laws made by them without any loss of sleep.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I remember posting here and suggesting that a database of website addresses be created, and accessible via a look-up number, the idea being that you may be able to make a url illegal to print, but a number would be going too far (this was related to the DeCss issue too i think).
Perhaps we'll find out soon whether numbers CAN be illegal - not just very very long ones, such as a cd (or religious secret), but short or natural ones.
"I suspect the final outcome will be some judge saying "too bad" and declaring this number illegal without actually explaining himself."
So a database of prime numbers would have to exclude certain numbers? What year do you think it will be when the last country with internet access on earth bows to the wishes of an American judge and orders a such a database to be taken off line? I dont think it will happen this year, anyway?
:)
So what happens if i find a prime which happens to unzip to Stan by Eminem, or Scientology secrets, or a list of spies, or whatever?
What i someone set up Primster - a site which allows users to trade prime numbers. How hard is it to find these primes?
*low growl*
I'm gonna go start work on "Texter" an internet text book trading programme.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
Ok. Perhaps I was using a slightly inaccurate definition of irrational numbers, but my point is that for number such as e and pi, which are naturally derivable as opposed to the construct you describe, do possess this property.
That's probably not entirely clear, so I will explain what I mean by calling your number a construct. The algorithm you describe does not really generate a number. It generates a string of digits. If you convert the number corresponding to this string of digits to a different base, your pattern vanishes. Thus it is not really a natural pattern, but a coincidence created by working backwards, kind of like the images in the gallery of DeCSS decoders that just happen to have the gzipped code embedded in them. You have created a very interesting coincidence, but it's like saying that because you can build a Pentium III from elements found in nature, that Pentium IIIs are naturally occurring. Even Douglas Adams would grimace at that one.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
This prime number _IS_ deCSS. The MPAA will either have to ban this prime number, ban gzip, or ban anyone from telling people that the number is deCSS.
Either way, I don't see this getting through the courts, even in the US...
Shit, at least Piers Anthony has a sense of humor! Hell, I've fallen out of my chair laughing my ass off at his books, something that I cannot say for any Noble Prize winning books. At least Piers Anthony has a sense of humor and communicates with the readers. Hell, that is likely the reason that he is so popular, people get to know him, not just read a book and close the cover.
Granted, not Noble Prize material, but Puns ARE funny, and if you do not like puns then mabye you shouldn't be a part of a culture that in general, tends to like puns.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
So, he's a dirty old man, at his age he has a right to be a dirty old man!! Besides, I didn't say he wasn't filthy, but heck, that doesn't affect the quality of his writting! As long as you don't mind reading descriptions of beatifull female bodies, then his writting style is quite excellent:)
If you do mind reading lengthy descriptions of well endowed woman, then just skip over that paragraph damnit! Heck, it is not that hard.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
http://www.google.com/search?q=1984+orwell+text+fu ll+download
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I think what the poster meant was that if you had a rod a mile long, you would be able to record more data on it then a rod an inch long, beacuse you could get a more precise mesurement.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Just how persuasive is that? I don't know. Windows is copyrighted; the bigass number is not.
I suspect the final outcome will be some judge saying "too bad" and declaring this number illegal without actually explaining himself.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
I wasnt talking about how many lines it takes to implement the encryption, im talking about how many lines it takes to crack it.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
Since this and the 7 line DeCSS program shows how easy it really is to crack CSS I don't think CSS is was an honest attempt to protect the work ok DVD's. And I believe that the law says that for it to be illegal for somebody to break encryption the person encrypting the code must make an honest attempt at protecting it. Because of this, all of the lawsuits and criminal charges against people should be thrown out of the courts.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
Umm, remember that article with the script (perl I think) that was the shortest implementation of DeCSS possible? Could this be used to make an even shorter one? Except that I believe that the mathematical algorithm for finding primes is a bitch, so it might be a longer program just to find the prime number without writing the whole damn thing out. Idunno, just a thought. I'm not a math major.
Here's my contribution.
Maybe other numbers will spew out other source code, like Windows ME, or OSX (that's why it's taking so long :P) or even linux! Sorry tux, your a random length number
You're right. Every computer program can be represented as one really *big* number. Additionally, there are numbers that could represent all of Microsoft's programs with innumerable variations, such as the "Start" button being replaced with one reading "Crash!"
All of the information on your hard drive can be thought of as one large number.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
If this keeps going on, I will not be allowed to take math anymore! Woohoo! Because learning about math lets people violate copyright > less people learn math = less broken copyright = population dumb enough to fall under rule of MPAA & RIAA & Clams = Me moving to Canada
This
Hm, why not have some apes type Shakespeare...
Claus
In order to treat the number as a fraction between 0 and 1, you must have an upper limit for the integer result. Of course, the two constraints amount to the same problem, a limited data capacity. But it is interesting that even when the atomic aspect is ignored, there has to be an agreed limit to the capacity.
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
In my impression 'countable' here means you can order primes starting from 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 etc and say that 13 is the 7th prime, even though there are an infinite number of primes.
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This also raises the interesting question whether you could take any pattern in nature, filter it through some (legal) algorithm and get DeCSS. You could always (in principle) hack such a filter that produced the DeCSS code out of any pattern you happen to choose. Because there number of such patterns is infinite, there would be an infinite number of filters (including all filters already written). But since they cannot outlaw nature (I hope), all filters would become illegal.
However, the above scenario is so absurd that the only conclusion is: you just can't outlaw DeCSS!-)
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Open Source Transcendental Constant
In a revelation that could rock the foundations of science, a researcher in Pennsylvania has discovered that the digits of the transcendental constant PI encode a version of the Linux kernel. "I can't believe it," the researcher, Neil Hoffman, exclaimed. "And yet, here I am staring at what appears to be the source code for Linux kernel 5.0.0. Needless to say, my whole world-view has changed..."
Hoffman made the discovery accidentally. "I was trying to write a more efficient algorithm in C to calculate individual digits of PI. However, my relative lack of programming experience, combined with C's highly obfuscated syntax, led me to the discovery. Instead of calculating each digit and returning it as an int, my program was (for some reason I still haven't been able to figure out) converting it to its ASCII equivalent and returning it as a char."
"Then it hit me. What if some kind of secret messages, encoded in ASCII, was stored in the digits of PI? I set to work on the problem, and after several months of toil, have discovered the awesome truth. My algorithm, which applies several dozen conversions and manipulations of each digit of PI, spits out plain vanilla ASCII characters that happen to form the source code for the Linux kernel."
"I tried to compile the source code, but gcc choked on it. Apparently a later version of gcc is needed to compile the Linux 5.0.0 source code. It's too bad the code for gcc isn't encoded in another transcendental constant. Or is it? I wonder what would happen if I fed e through my algorithm..."
Many scientists are skeptical about Hoffman's discovery. One mathematician who has memorized the digits of PI to 10,000 places said, "This is the kind of nonsense one would expect to find in a tabloid such as the National Mathematics Enquirer. Or a nerd humor site. Hoffman's discovery' is obviously a hoax designed to secure government research grants."
Another scientist Segfault contacted said, "Hoffman's claim is filled with holes large enough to push Windows 95 through. Apply a little critical thinking and look at all the inconsistencies and problems with Hoffman's discovery'. ASCII is an arbitrary code. Why not EBCDIC? Also, the base 10 number system, which his PI-to-ASCII scheme is based on, is arbitrary. Why not binary numbers? Oh, and then there's the biggie: PI is infinitely long. The Linux source code is not (Windows NT, on the other hand...). Explain that, PI Boy!"
Hoffman will formally present his findings to the scientific community on March 14th at the Annual PI Day Conference and Exposition in Chicago. One conference attendee said, "Usually the PI Day expo is pretty boring, with some asinine workshops about 'The History of PI' and Teaching Techniques to Make Learning About PI More Fun for Remedial High School Students'. However, with the unfolding brouhaha surrounding the Linux-PI connection, this could be a very interesting convention. Then again, there's going to be several hundred mathematicians from around the world in attendance. It might not be that exciting after all."
In a related matter, Segfault has received an unconfirmed report that a region of the standard Mandelbrot fractal contains what appear to be the words "LINUS TORVALDS WAS HERE". In addition, the words "TRANSMETA: THIS SECRET MESSAGE IS NOT HERE YET" supposedly appear within the depths of the Julia Set.
Linus Torvalds and Benoit Mandelbrot were unavailable for comment at press time.
--
Dyolf Knip
The number can possibly be rewritten as a single line equation (or at least a much shorter message than it currently is).
ie. some 3 digit prime ^ some 2 digit number + what's left over factored.
Maybe there exists a 1 or 2 line equation that evaluates to this number.
I challenge you to find one Piers Anthony book where a female character (human, centaur, whatever) is not described by the size (or at least existence) of her breasts at least once in the book
the man is an obsessed pervert
Rephrased without changing semantics: "You forget the DeCSS as a problem is mainly a USofA legal issue, developed countries see things differently."
You just made that up for the sake of this post, right? Because it sure isn't true for any Slavic girls I ever met, and I live in a predominantly Slavic community.
Then again, I could just be making this up. Maybe I'm a Martian, even. This is /. Think about what you are reading. :)
It's not illegal anywhere else in the world. Go to Canada, Europe, even AUSTRALIA, and it's legal.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Hey, I've got a great idea.
Let's implement a peer-to-peer service that does nothing but trade really big number! Yeah!
And the numbers will be in hexidecimal format! Yeah!
And, wow, you can pack exactly two hexidecimal digits into a byte! Wow!
So all we need is a name for this new number-swapping service.
I'm leaning towards gnutella, after nutella, which is pretty tasty. Keen, eh?
one of those pretty random number things, and then get is distributed on the free downloads sites as a windows theme....
share the wealth.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If it ended in 4, it wouldn't be prime.
Yes it is. I did it (I am Phil Carmody) purely as another _stupid_ stunt.
I'm not even American, so it's less of an issue for me. However, I just wanted to do take part in my little criticism of the stupidity of that particular law.
FatPhil
--
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Yes. Charles Hannum and myself have found a prime number that encodes the shorted known C implementation of DeCSS. All straight C, just represented in ascii in base 256.
FatPhil (The Phil Carmody in question)
--
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
There is an intricate mathematical reason why I did it without the tables. In short - the number is too damn big to prove _formally_ (I am a mathematician) using Elliptic Curve Primality Proving (ECPP), due to the O(n^6) runtime.
In my favour is the precedent set by the Think Geek T-shirt which has no tables either. Unless you're talking about the one with only tables, and that has no code. If ThinkGeek have an illegal T-shirt, then my prime number is just as illegal.
FatPhil
--
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
As far as the randomness goes, in practice I suppose it doesn't have to be cryptographically good randomness. Both the key and the encrypted file would then have a pattern to them, but it'd still be impossible to determine which one was generated pseudo-randomly and which one was the result of an XOR, unless you knew when they were created.
As for the bandwidth requirements, that's part of the magic that would get fixed by peer-to-peer or similar technologies. If you cut the old Napster in half, that's still more than the 60% userbase reduction from the RIAA-mandated filtering (assuming, of course, a uniform distribution of traffic, which obviously isn't the case).
I suppose the big kicker is that, if nothing else, they could always go after the person distributing the file recreation recipe. It doesn't matter if I've managed to distribute a given pirated mp3 across the XOR of 500 files all served by other people -- someone has to say, "'Metallica - Sandman.mp3' is Bob's file #274 XORed with Ted's file #714 XORed with ..." Imagine if, instead, the recipe were something like "Take byte #27 from Bob's file #274 and byte #18 from Ted's file #714." Now imagine if, instead, it were "Take entry #77 from the ASCII table. Take entry #90 from the ASCII table."
And if you don't make the recreation recipe public, then you might as well just PGP encrypt the files, throw them on a web server, and only give the decryption key to your closest friends. That's the sort of piracy that's a lot closer in scope to the traditional "fair use" notion that the pro-Napster crowd keeps pointing towards, anyway. It's also the sort of piracy that probably isn't worth the time and the effort for the RIAA to pursue. It's the "available for 2.4 million of my dearest and closest friends" that really worries them.
The problem in this case is that there's a clear deliniation of which entity is which. Unlike the random number archive example, one can point to the RIAA's web page and say, "Obviously, your honor, our index.html existed first and was used to encrypt a copy of decss.c."
I wouldn't know how to express such a concept as a formal proof or even as legalese, but it's something that's intuitively easy for humans to grasp. I suppose that's not the best way to put it, but that's part of why the law is evaluated by humans rather than machines. A human is capable, for example, of saying, "Yes, Ted violated all the verbage of the law against running red lights, but given that his car was being pushed by the raving psychopath in the truck behind him, no rational person could consider him guilty of a crime." Humans make fuzzy judgements about guilt, intent, and cause/effect all the time.
You seem to have an odd definition of "unrelated". "Extract a sequence of pi starting at position X and continuing to position Y." is a fairly simple function, that can be defined as a decryption scheme. The numbers you find into that scheme are your encoded message and the result is your message. Just because your formula uses pi doesn't make your input unrelated to your output.
On the other hand, XOR does allow for some confusion. Imagine I take a purely random file (based off of measuring radioactive decay or some such) and then XOR it with DeCSS. Now I've got my random file and my encrypted DeCSS -- the catch is that there's no way to tell which is which. If I've got both files, I can XOR them and get DeCSS, but otherwise both files look like random noise and both files are treated "equally" by the decryption process.
To make things even more interesting, imagine two people, named Bob and Ted, who have online collections of files with random numbers in them. Now let's say Ted's a bit of a free speech advocate. So he takes a copy of DeCSS, XORs it with one of Bob's random number files, and posts it to his site as a collection of random numbers. How do you prove that it's Ted who's hosting the copy of DeCSS and not Bob? What if you force Bob to remove his set of random numbers, when someone else had used that set as an XOR decryption key for something else? What if that person had both the encrypted and unencrypted versions available (say, as a demonstration of using XOR to encrypt a file)? Using the encrypted and unencrypted versions for the third party, you could recreate Bob's (removed) key. Then you could use that key to decrypt Ted's encrypted DeCSS.
This discovery proves that there is a God, who has hidden this inside a prime number to get our attention, and to let us know that he is a hacker.
That also explains why the bible is so damn tedious to read, just like most of the man pages I have to deal with.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Indeed, this also fits in with the article in which the author quotes someone as saying, "set theory is a disease from which I hope future generations will recover." Now we can finally start along that long road to recovery.
The only problem with this is that the randomness of Pi and other such numbers will result in a huge pile of "noise" that conceals whatever hidden information might be found therein.
Yes, concealed in the digits of Pi may just be a CSSed HDTV special edition of the entire run of "Diff'rent Strokes". But, in order to find that magic section of digits, you're going to have to generate Pi out to a level of precision so far beyond what can be described as astronomical, that if you tried to store the number using a single atom for each digit, your copy of Pi would be more massive than the entire universe.
In other words, it's a great idea, just not very practical. All those monkeys banging on all those keyboards may well generate the complete works of Shakespeare; but when they do finally dublicate the life's work of the Bard, you'll have to sort through trillions of tons of waste paper to find it. Good luck managing all that paper.
I rang, you rang, we all rang for orangutang!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Very very cool.
Ya know, this battle of wits between the DVD CCA / MPAA and the hackers of the world is not going particularly well for the corporate interests.
The one reason this is interesting though is that it highlights an important question about code (and speach in general), does someone "create" it, or does one just "find" it. If I write a programme and combile it I could say I just researched for a while to come up with the hexadecimal number that executes to run a word processor...
Maybe, I can claim prior art on all code by just writing down a mathematical representation for all natural numbers (e.g. the commonly used N) + an algorithm for converting it into code (such as the change to hexadec. and gunzip it, or just rename to .exe and execute it). I have in effect written down all possible computer programmes, just because someone else "found" one of them as well does not mean I don't hold my rights to it :), and just because i haven't tested every single one of them, does not mean they don't exist...
It might be worth trying to get a US patent on all code that can be obtained from a single number :) (i.e. all code)
Try thinking positive instead of negative.
... bring on the quantum computer.
...
Why does the data being transferred have to be illegal. Maybe it's legal ! This could be a great way of reducing bandwidth. Bad luck about the storage required to hold all the digits of PI.
ie. instead of shipping products new customers just log into your web site and are given two numbers. The system to extract the appropriate code from PI is embedded in the OS and will automagically extract the digits, convert them and write to them disk.
Hey why even write them to disk. Maybe in the year 2020AD all computers have a memory chip embedded with PI and when you execute a programme it's extracted and executed on the fly
Imagine this invention in the year 2090AD. Some new genius has significantly increased the speed of his computer by storing executables in memory (i.e. Hard disks are defunct by then) in binary form. The programmes can be executed directly without any conversion. The worlds biggest central processing center (Microsoft Central Systems) has shown great interest in this invention. An MS CS spokesman said that using this technique could save millions of dollars in processing time.
OK I'm starting to ramble so that's it
There are infinite number of primes.
We can, however, put them into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers (as in, x is the nth prime). They are, therefore, in math lingo, countable.
For double irony, use this number as your encryption key.
-John
I can imagine this turning up in lots of places now, hidden comments in HTML code, thinkgeek T-Shirts, you name it.
--
no sig.
I'd code this myself if I could, but couldn't someone write a simple file encryption program that uses a large prime to do the encrypting. The large prime is kept in a separate file and the prime that is distributed with the software is the DeCSS prime. That way there is another useful purpose for this prime and you can't use arguments that its ONLY purpose is decrypting DVD's (the main argument against DeCSS in the beginning).
Well, one of my personal heros -- Bruce Schneier -- said waaaaay back in November 1999 why this is pretty trivial. He said in the November 1999 issue (and I quote):
Every DVD player, including hardware consoles that plug into your television and software players that you can download to your computer, has its own unique unlock key. (Actually, each has several. I don't know why.) This key is used to unlock the decryption key on each DVD. A DVD has 400 copies of the same unique decryption key, each encrypted with every unlock code. Note the global secret: if you manage to get one unlock key for one player, you can decrypt every DVD.
He goes on to explain that this isn't even the point -- that the DVD 'security' mechanism is fundamentally flawed because you have unadaulterated access to the 'plaintext' (or the video being shown).
Just my $.02
Dan
-----------------------------
Someday, I hope to live in a world
Just think of the implications here. I could give you a number. The number itself is not illegal. However, you can take that number and a perl script and you could have almost anything. Instead of sharing mp3's, share the number that could be used to convert the output of the perl script into an mp3. What number would represent the gzipped linux kernel? If I post a bunch of numbers on my web page, is that illegal? The implications of this are wide and far reaching. I think that this is one of the more important discoveries made.
Could we then setup a distributed model much like seti@home that would discover source code? I don't see why not. Just imagine what could potentially be discovered this way. What if the NT kernel source were to be discovered? Since the info was never stolen from anyone, but randomly discovered, what would the implications be here?
Both of these scenarios could be possible. The legal ramifications would be a hairy mess. Would it be illegal to randomly convert long numbers into hex for the fear of discovering something? Will there be a new set of laws that cover math research? There are many many more possibilities that I believe we have yet to discover. So, is the second scenario cracking code or is it research and discovery? The laws of IP and the concepts of perception and reality, etc are now even more vulnerable and questionable. Our entire number system may be illegal under this new paradigm.
There is a distinct separation between something being wrong, being enforceable, and something you didn't mention, something illegal.
To some minds, banning DeCSS is ridiculous. It isn't illegal (reverse engineering software, such as the Xing player) to write, nor is it illegal to use (fair use of one's own DVDs!)
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Reminds me of an episode of Jim Henson's Dinosaurs in which the number 2 is banned because it rhymes with "smoo," which was apparently dinosaur profanity. By law, everyone had to count "1, more than one, 3 4 5."
Addition and subtraction may be more useful for you.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The article says that the source is "Sans Tables".. in other words, it's useless. So what's the point? Isn't it the encryption keys that are actually the "trade secrets" in question?
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
Math haters rejoice! Theory of prime number is now illegal under Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
4 real, its ONLY a comment. Maybe you suffer from comment/karma/penis envy?
"I am a warrior, and information is my weapon..."
...can someone just convert this to C and make a program to convert it?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
All those contradictions arise from the artificial restriction of information distribution by legal law. Mathematically spoken, the Copyright/"IP" laws are not consistent with the axiomatic structure of nature itself, therefore contradictions arise when these laws are enforced. The contradictions can only be resolved by changing the legal laws because the laws of nature cannot be changed (i.e. you cannot change the fact that to actually use information you have to give it away/duplicate it and, more important, that you cannot take back information once you gave it away unless you kill the carrier, e.g. killing unwanted witnesses).
Sorry, I couldn't resist *g*. It's probably better to say 'axiom structure' instead of 'axiomatic structure' - have to ask the grammar nazi.
That's exactly the reason why they chose a prime number not an arbitrary number! The prime is kind of the "plasma physics data set".
The gzip stage is not important. It's only used to get a smaller prime number. The important "encoding" is the prime calculation algorithm that generates loads of prime numbers that represent copyrighted information or illegal algorithms (like DeCSS). The question is now whether this makes prime number calculation algorithms illegal or whether it is only illegal to tell which prime number represents which illegal algo./copyrighted work (as is the case now).
Now we won't be able to use numbers anymore! Math geeks will finally have something to protest!
http://www.codewolf.com - Just good stuff to waste time
Scientific American article
From the article: ""I was kind of interested in pushing the system to see how far you could go with allowable claims," explains Schlafly, a member of the League for Programming Freedom, an organization that opposes software patents. Although Schlafly can now sue anybody for using his numbers, he is not worried about people infringing on his rights. "When you get to numbers that are so big that nobody has used them before, well, there are lots of them up there," he says."
Patent number 5,373,560
"Because of the kinds of idiots who modded a Pun up to +5!! WTF"
/. Moderarors FAQ, which I read before I moderated when last week I had moderators access). I've had stuff modded down before simply because my opinion didn't fit the political views of the moderator. Fortunately someone else modded it back up again...
I thought it was funny... Maybe it's not worth a 5, but who cares? I wish the moderators would spend more time moderating things UP than down (which is in the
Back on the topic at hand...
As one poster stated, it's fucking AMAZING how much more creativity and ingenuity there is in the hacker community than in the corps.. But then, ingenuity and innovation rarely happens in groups or comittes (which corps are), but at the INDIVIDUAL level.
How many truly world changing inventions were invented by a comitte? None spring to my mind, though I'm sure there are a handful. But they would be in the minority. Even inventions by corps mostly came from a single INDIVIDUAL.
There is an anti-individualist disease infecting the USA these days. Why? Because those in power have a lot easier time dealing with the population as disparate "groups" they can play off one another rather than 281 million INDIVIDUALS. It's not yet reached the head, but when it does, the USA will cease to be a union on individuals and a union of "groups". Once we complete the process of losing the concept of INDIVIDUAL rights, INDIVIDUAL liberty, we are doomed to be a non-innovative nation.
Laws like the DMCA represent this process. It was written by corporations, to trump the rights of individuals and transfer them to the groups.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I completely agree. I've also been a vehement Piers Anthony fan since very young. His perversion is a facinating element in his books, which I feel greatly expands the depth of his writing. It is neither malicious nor derogatory, and therefore merely serves the purpose of showing us yet another interesting point of view, albeit demented... :)
"Ummmm..."
Oh no! I've ended with a preposition.
That is the kind of pedantry up with which we will not put.
(Winston Churchill, I think)
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
I know that large primes are often used for encryption (and decryption) of data, but, uhh...
Well, I'm sure Diffie and Hellman did NOT have this in mind when they were thinking about encryption, but it's cool nonetheless...
I suppose the next thing we'll see is QuantumDeCSS, where the DeCSS code is encoded in the polarity of photons. Any attempt for the MPAA to view the code summarily destroys it, though
The MPAA has issued a statement on the article posted by /.
"All your base 16 are belong to us"
--Joey
Yeah, but unless you carry that last 3, you'll still be watching static. *sigh*, victim of another bad translation... :-)
Oh, shut up.
Are you a member of the fucking karma police?
Personally, I think it's really stupid when people complain about karma/modding. You know why? There's absolutely nothing that can be done about it -- is it THAT hard to realize that simple fact? For perfect proof of this general rule, look at what your post got modded down to. Moron.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
What if I take 2 MP3 and XOR them together. One I store on napster the other on gnutella. So is now napster storing none of the two, one of the two files or both? What if one is in the public domain? George
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
- Someone writes a java app capable of searching Pi for a number series identical to the ASCII values of the text they wish to tranfer.
- Upon finding this series, the location of it in Pi is transferred in a format something like "12137-12193" meaning "the message begins at place 12137 and ends at place 12193"
- Bingo. Your recipient has the message and all you transferred was two completely unrelated numbers.
Then again, maybe Pi is illegal.
All your 48565...2944 belong to us!
This reminds me of an idea I thought up. Create a compiler by reverse engineering one of JonKatz' articles. Have it output the decss code. Then make a few small hello world proggies to prove that it's a real compiler. Either Katz is declared a circumvention mechanism or decss is declared legal. Either way it's a win-win situation.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
The xor method is indeed very good, I wonder why it has not yet been used by filesharing networks? (My guess: it is too expensive to generate high quality random files of the necessary size. Also it doubles b/w requirements).
It reminds me of the legal conundrum where identical twins commit two different murders at the same time but in different places. There are plenty of witnesses, but the police can't be sure who killed whom. The two murder cases get assigned to two different judges. Will the twins go free? (Variation: the victims are the twins).
A good approximation to pi(x), the number of all primes below x, which was first given by Gauss is obtained by taking as starting point the empirical fact that the frequency of prime numbers near a very large number x is almost exactly 1/log x. From this, the number of prime numbers up to x is approximately given by the logarithmic sum Ls(x) = 1/log 2 + 1/log 3 + ... + 1/log x
which can be bounded from below by x/log x.
So, if x has 1400 digits, the number of primes below x will have 1397 digits, give or take one.
So you could save three bytes. Surely a contender for the prize for the most gratuitous use of all cpu time until the end of time.