The writer of this is confused. The UK politicians don't care about whether something is trivial or not, all they want is to ban it.
Sort of like making a fire is trivial, and it's illegal to do so in many places.
Sort of like making a fire is trivial, and it's illegal to do so in many places.
Information can be copied at zero cost, transmitted instantly over vast distances, and stored permanently and undetectably in the human brain. Information spreads like a virus in a very literal sense - you overhear a scrap of plot and suddenly a whole film is spoiled. Trying to ban information is a futile as trying to arrest people for catching influenza. This isn't like banning campfires, or even like banning firemaking implements, it's like banning the very idea of fire.
We see it that way, they don't. We certainly won't win this battle by trying to teach them information theory (good luck! :) )
Whether this little technical demonstration does that or not... well, we'll see. But I absolutely can't fault the effort.
I think your goalposts are shifting here. A simple example that is easy to spread and easy to demonstrate sounds at least plausible. It certainly doesn't sound to me like teaching them information theory, it sounds more like a challenge: "How will your laws prevent me doing this?" Perhaps they'll block Twitter too?
Yes, but demonstrating the practical difficulty in trying to regulate 102-byte sequences that can fit on a T-shirt (or in a tweet) has a utility of its own.
It's what Prof. Dave Touretzky did in the case of DeCSS, which got shrunk down to 434 bytes when implemented in C: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
In legal terms: all you are doing is irrelevant technical wanking.
There's a deeper problem with banning encryption of any form (e.g. "strong encryption") that an encrypted file can be made indistinguishable from random data. If the police or any prosecutor will never be able to tell that a chunk of that was strongly encrypted (technically feasible), the law will never work.
And then there's the sheer absurdity of the idea, which the comparison banishing starting fires doesn't capture.
It's not like the sort of logical reasoning that happens when software engineers battle for the Right way to do something. :)
You can then embed crypto in those streams. When the prosecutors can't even distinguish intent then there's a problem. No third party may ever know someone exchanged encrypted messages.
So again, I'm not saying the law is fundamentally inconsistent or anything, it's just that it's pretty easy to make it unenforceable and undetectable.
You just massively increased bandwidth cost and download times.
The noise, which is added to everything, is not compressible so now everything takes a lot more badwidth.
Keep in mind the law is targeting malicious actors, people that would likely try to use this sort of circumvention even if it isn't mainstream.
In a shit sack world, the inquisition just points out that there is noise in a lot of your messages and you're done, you don't get a chance to wax philosophical about your intent.
In an even worse world, they just insinuate that you might be communicating secretly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121029045140/http://marutukku....
It only fails if the government knows a priori you are a criminal and inspects your hardware.
I thought about making a few proof of concept models for this, but I don't think there's real demand for it (and I'm lazy) -- steganography is probably sufficient for what most people use.
Just wanted to make sure we're talking about the same thing, counselor. :)
Which is absurd. I thought we hashed this out when DeCSS was a thing.