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Comment by qz3 | Hacker News Reader

I always felt that that "illegal numbers" is a misunderstanding of data.

There are no illegal numbers. But if you provide context, they can become illegal data. Let's take child pornography for an example, because that's universally accepted as illegal. I could come up with a formula which translates a huge number into a bitmap. I could post the number (i.e. the input for the formula) online, because it is absolutely meaningless to anyone else. But when I publish my formula, it is no longer a number. It's data which can be interpreted as something meaningful, an image.

Everything is just a number without context.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number :>

You can literally arbitrarily associate any number to anything and ban it based on that, which they did:

> In 2012, it was reported that the numbers 89, 6, and 4 each became banned search terms on search engines in China, because of the date (1989-06-04) of the June Fourth Massacre in Tiananmen Square.

> Due to the association with gangs, in 2012 a school district in Colorado banned the wearing of jerseys that bore the numbers 18, 14, or 13 (or the reverse, 81, 41, or 31).

> In 2017, far-right Slovak politician Marian Kotleba was criminally charged for donating 1,488 euro to a charity.

It's closely related to hate speech laws where the only requirement is perceived threat. Fun times. :D

That's why the Tiananmen Square Maassacre anniversary date is commonly referred to as "May 35th".

Banning specific representations of an idea is a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as you ban one symbolic representation, a new one will be created.

The Chinese government isn't stupid. They do what they do because it works. Even the opposition agrees with this, hence the term

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

The website dedicated to the topic of the OP article is even called... http://chillingeffects.org/ (since renamed to https://lumendatabase.org/ )

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