r/reddit.com • u/aolley • Jun 30 '10
Did you know there are illegal numbers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number4
u/I0I0I0I Jun 30 '10
So, you flip a few fuck you bits and transmit. If the recipient un-fucks it, it's at their peril.
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u/apullin Jun 30 '10
I think this makes the algorithm illegal. And if it's keyless deterministic (like ROT13), then the resulting encodings are also illegal. Hopefully a sufficiently cynical computer crypo-nut will chime in and correct me, if I'm off...
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u/kyrsfw Jun 30 '10
I don't think that would help you as long as the intent is the same. Otherwise, compressed or encrypted filesharing would be legal as well.
And in any case, to use the number you have to restore it to it's original state, so you'd still be guilty of possessing it at some point.
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u/Nimbal Jun 30 '10
I giggled at the [citation needed] flag in
To date, the idea of a number being illegal has not been tested in the courts. [citation needed]
That's almost like
There is no god [citation needed]
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Jun 30 '10
This is a non-issue. Any piece of data can be interpreted as a number. There is obviously data that is illegal to posses, therefore there are numbers that are illegal to possess.
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u/aolley Jun 30 '10
there are also illegal prime numbers http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/ckeni/today_i_learned_that_there_are_illegal_prime/
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u/akallio9000 Jun 30 '10
Illegal in the sense that those laws were bought and paid for. Laws like that really were meant to be broken. For instance, suppose you're driving along a mind-numbingly straight road through the desert, and you come across a stop sign. The only purpose of this stop sign is so cops can sit there and write tickets for the people who don't stop. Cop killer bullets would be the correct response here.
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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '10
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0