There are several past threads of this article but this comment about how the DeCSS illegal prime was created seemed the most interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045394
E.g. publicizing the number and expiration date of Bill Gates' credit-card is illegal but what if we wrote a text commentary about Shakespeare's Hamlet that when SHA-1 hashed, it gives you that same information? Yes, it would be very computationally intensive to generate a plausible literary text but it could be done. Or one embeds Bill Gates credit-card number as "transactions amounts" on Bitcoin blockchain.
The theme is the same: find a "legitimate" information channel to transmit illegitimate data. This then allows the philosophical arguments about information:
- How can commentary about Shakespeare be illegal? It's education!
- How can you censor transactions on the bitcoin blockchain? There are already 100,000+ copies of it on nodes around the globe! And so on...
This might be thought of as a human version of a covert channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel
E.g. publicizing the number and expiration date of Bill Gates' credit-card is illegal but what if we wrote a text commentary about Shakespeare's Hamlet that when SHA-1 hashed, it gives you that same information? Yes, it would be very computationally intensive to generate a plausible literary text but it could be done. Or one embeds Bill Gates credit-card number as "transactions amounts" on Bitcoin blockchain.
The theme is the same: find a "legitimate" information channel to transmit illegitimate data. This then allows the philosophical arguments about information:
- How can commentary about Shakespeare be illegal? It's education!
- How can you censor transactions on the bitcoin blockchain? There are already 100,000+ copies of it on nodes around the globe! And so on...