Re:Illegal Hashes
by advisedwang on Monday November 28, 2022 @07:53PM
(#33782203)
> It’s unclear that illegal numbers exist outside of intent to communicate the illegal ideal
Correct. Intent is important in the law. And when it comes to "Illegal numbers" and copyright in general _provenance_ is important too. I love sharing this article with people: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
> It’s unclear that illegal numbers exist outside of intent to communicate the illegal idea
That assumes a sane legal system where intent matters. If we're talking about an authoritarian despot, they might not care if you intended to say something negative about you. Just the fact that you did might be enough.
It’s unclear that illegal numbers exist outside of intent to communicate the illegal idea. Otherwise all irrationals including pi and e are illegal. And it’s probably possible to view/interpret any data you have in some way that happens to coincide with an illegal number. If anyone was going to have legal trouble for coincidental unintentional hashes, then everyone has a problem, which is exactly why it’s unlikely to go there, it’s clearly absurd.
> Decoded into ASCII, that spells I hate the queen
This is an example of what I mean - while this hash is theoretically possible, note that hashes are not typically ever displayed as ASCII, so why ASCII? That was a narrative choice in this article. Hashes are almost unanimously displayed as hex, or base64, which have no spaces for good reasons. Side note, it’s extremely rare for a hash to ever make sense when interpreted as ASCII due to needing zero entropy in the first bit of every byte for that to happen (observe they are all zero).