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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.
Will this number now be a prime suspect?
---
ticks = jiffies;
while (ticks == jiffies);
ticks = jiffies;
Have you read my journal today?
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?
Inspired by Phil's effort, a prime number encoding of the source of efdtt.c has been contributed by Charles M. Hannum.
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 =)
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))
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.
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.
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.
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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 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.