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Comment by corndoge | Hacker News Reader

Only Americans are allowed to do nonlinear function approximation! Fuck off China!

Isn't this a bit over-reductionist, such as the people who claim that since all electronic images are represented by 0's and 1's images are just numbers and thus it is silly to ban an illegal image since it is just banning a number?

This is interesting... Does algorithm decode, let's say, a JPG image in such a way that would produce child porn out of let's say google logo, makes google logo illegal image? Does conveying an illegal image in other ways, let's say describe in text detailed attributes of such an image, makes such text illegal? Not from a law standpoint, as I am sure it is quite specific, but from a spirit of the law which in theory should represent cultural norms of the country using such laws?

The law doesn't really have a problem with such technical hacks. They basically apply common sense - if you distribute a decoder that produces CP from the Google Logo, in legal terms that is no different to distributing CP.

I think someone wrote an article about this many years ago called "the colour of bits" or something like that. Basically the idea that you can trick your way out of the law with "it's just a number" type arguments are nonsense.

You're thinking of Matthew Skala's article "What Colour Are Your Bits?" https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

To clarify, what if such decoder indeed decodes images, but it happens that if you feed to it specific data set, like google's logo, result will be a child porn picture on the screen? I.e. I am not talking about intentionally making an algorithm to generate such picture, but rather if such result will be a side-effect. What will be CP in this case, google's logo, algorithm, both, none?

What's like to happen? Given how low the probability of such an event is to happen by chance, if the algorithm is traced back to you then the court will find you guilty of creating the algorithm specifically to produce the image. In short, you would be extremely unlucky.

Why in this case maker of decoder should go to jail and not creator of google logo? To really make it difficult - let's assume both image and decoder was made at the same time.

If both were created at the same time, it would be a far different court case. I was assuming the case where the logo clearly predates the algorithm, because in that case you would get enough expert witnesses to testify that the logo was itself clean and thus it is extremely likely the algorithm was developed to specifically produce that image given the input.

If both were provably independently created at the same time, you would probably instead be having an uproar among scientists about the probability for such an event happening. It may still cause issues because the probability of such an event is so small, that the probability of the proof of their being independently created being wrong is the far more likely event.

If it was genuinely by chance, then nobody would believe you and you would still go to jail.

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