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.
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.
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?
Anybody got one which decodes to the Scientology OT secret documents?
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.
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.
1 is neither a prime nor is it a composite. Same goes for zero.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
infinity consisting of numbers ending with two is the exact same as infinity which is divisible by 1/16. it is infinite.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Inspired by Phil's effort, a prime number encoding of the source of efdtt.c has been contributed by Charles M. Hannum.
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
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))
-- 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
But wouldn't that number be useless unless you had a table of all 12345... numbers, or else replicated all the computational work yourself?
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.
Not even close: 1/x is between 0 and 1 for all x > 1. More efficient schemes are of course possible.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
[
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
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?)
I had a post modded up and down like 8 times, settling eventually on 3.
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Where 1 is a prime or not is largely a matter of contention. But you certainly cannot call it a composite number, for then all other prime numbers would have to be composite as well.
Exactly.
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
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
:)
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?
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!
First Carmody took the original anonymous version of the DeCSS C-code and gzip'ed it (a standard UNIX program for making files smaller). Suppose we call the resulting number k. 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. At the time these were found they both were large enough to fit on the list of largest known primes (because of the method of proof).
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...
http://www.google.com/search?q=1984+orwell+text+fu ll+download
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"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.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
> How many 1400 digit primes exist?
A little less than 10 times the amount of less than 1400 digits ones.
Looks like geeks have troubles understanding what entropy is. Face it, you'll not going to get this number much smaller than 1400 digits, no matter how hard you try it.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
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|
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!-)
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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.
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Dyolf Knip
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"
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
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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.
Well, this number (call it N) is not neccesarily prime really, it could be divisible by a prime not on your list (which also shows that the primes are infinite).
Example: 2*3*5*7*11*13+1=30031=59*509.
More a little technicality than anything- the number itself is not always prime, but it does have a least divisor D (other than 1) such that D is not on your list and D is prime. (D can be N itself if N is prime).
That said, the comment you replied to didn't say the primes were finite.
-skip
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.
For double irony, use this number as your encryption key.
-John
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
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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.
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).
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.
It's a nice idea. You could encode a file as the offset from the nearest prime number, and then describe that file as the offset and the index into a prime number list. However, the primes involved would be huge, and the distance between primes would be large too. Your compression would be directly related to how near you are to a prime.
Basically, it would be very slow and doesn't really attack the fundamental target of compression, ie to increase the entropy of the data by removing redundant information.
Does my bum look big in this?
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
Clearly, this is not a holy number. I predict that tomorrow's headline shall be Catholic Church Denounces DeCSS.
(Lameness filter, filter thyself! It's not an awful long string of letters, it's a number. It's not in all caps, it's a number. A number is a character with an ASCII value in the range of 48 to 57. Capital letters are from 65 to 90. Got it?)
(Do not sign anything.) -- Fell, Planescape: Torment
The MPAA has issued a statement on the article posted by /.
"All your base 16 are belong to us"
--Joey
Take any file. Compress it with your algorithm. Store the result to a file. Compress it again. Repeat until the result is just a bit. You can't get further down with a computer. And no matter what representation you choose, you'll run into the same limitation.
So while it may seem intuitive that you could use this for compression to yield very small results, and it indeed could work that for a small subset of information, you would still have a huge set of data you would be unable to compress.
In many cases you will see that compression algorithms that work extremely well on some data will work very badly on anything outside a very narrowly defined set. As an example, I can easily compress a megabyte of data to one bit. The only problem is I'll only be able to compress two different sets of a megabyte, and I won't be able to encode anything else, since one bit only allow me to choose between two outputs.
In other words: Sure, you can use it for a compression algorithm, but don't expect to be able to get any revolutionary results from it, because if you want to be able to compress a large set of different inputs, the numbers will necessarily get big for most of the input sets.
- 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.
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.