Ok, some people have already pointed out the obviously wrong pieces in the article, most notably the completely wrong reference to what is known as birthday effect.
What I would like to mention is that I can't see any new way to circumvent censorship using the proposed method. As the author writes, it is as good as unlikely to discover such hidden content by chance. Thus, the knowledge which blocks are required to retrieve hidden content can only be originated by the author of said content. Once someone has this information, s/he can view the content. Using this information is legally not different from viewing a jpeg encoded picture or even reading plain ascii text. One runs a viewer on something which basically contains zeros and ones. The fact that those zeros and ones have firstly to be downloaded from various locations scattered all over the net is just a technical detail, similar to applying jpeg decompression or displaying bytes as ascii text.
I am not a legal expert, but I do not believe that the law explicitely names the technical methods which have to be applied to view illegal content. If so, then they have to extend the law every time a new file format comes into fashion. Again, i do not think that it matters that the actual information is geographically separated form the knowledge how to retrieve it. If you like, this is already the case in well-known methods. If you want to view a jpeg, then you have to download a jpeg viewer first. The content is what counts, and not zeros and ones or local storage vs distributed storage.
You can always claim not to know the author of illegal content if you distribute it, i.e. if you announce which blocks XOR'ed together result in this content. This is exactly the same like saying 'I have no idea how the heroin made it into my luggage'. If you find heroin in your luggage, then you are legally obliged to report to the law enforcment. Do it and score some brownie points. Redestribute it for whatever purpose, you are a criminal.
I am not saying that cencorship is a good thing. I simply cannot see that the proposed method adds anything new to help circumvent it.
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What I would like to mention is that I can't see any new way to circumvent censorship using the proposed method. As the author writes, it is as good as unlikely to discover such hidden content by chance. Thus, the knowledge which blocks are required to retrieve hidden content can only be originated by the author of said content. Once someone has this information, s/he can view the content. Using this information is legally not different from viewing a jpeg encoded picture or even reading plain ascii text. One runs a viewer on something which basically contains zeros and ones. The fact that those zeros and ones have firstly to be downloaded from various locations scattered all over the net is just a technical detail, similar to applying jpeg decompression or displaying bytes as ascii text.
I am not a legal expert, but I do not believe that the law explicitely names the technical methods which have to be applied to view illegal content. If so, then they have to extend the law every time a new file format comes into fashion. Again, i do not think that it matters that the actual information is geographically separated form the knowledge how to retrieve it. If you like, this is already the case in well-known methods. If you want to view a jpeg, then you have to download a jpeg viewer first. The content is what counts, and not zeros and ones or local storage vs distributed storage.
You can always claim not to know the author of illegal content if you distribute it, i.e. if you announce which blocks XOR'ed together result in this content. This is exactly the same like saying 'I have no idea how the heroin made it into my luggage'. If you find heroin in your luggage, then you are legally obliged to report to the law enforcment. Do it and score some brownie points. Redestribute it for whatever purpose, you are a criminal.
I am not saying that cencorship is a good thing. I simply cannot see that the proposed method adds anything new to help circumvent it.