Talk:Illegal prime

I suspect that the attempt to be strictly NPOV has taken you a little too far. OK, I'm no mathematician, and I gave up programming when I sold my Z-80, but I have difficultly following the main thrust of the article - not the specifics, which are straightforward enough, but the implications of it. Tannin

Contents

1 no prime number discovery 2 detail on illegality under US law 3 derived work rubric under copyright law 4 URLs and blocking due to protest 5 Image 6 Dirichlet's theorem 7 The number!

no prime number discovery

I do not think he discovered a prime number. He manipulated the program until it became a prime number and then wanted to use that prime number as a proof that the DCMA is ridiculous. I will not air my opinion about the DCMA, but since all information can be turned into a number, and without substantially changing its content, it can be turned into a prime number, the claim to have discovered a new prime number seems a bit ridiculous to me.

There's nothing ridiculous about it. It just doesn't just "become" a prime number. So you've got this huge 1400 digit number, how the hell do you know if it's prime? The achievement is not in getting at the number, its the proof. -- Arvindn

And, if I use tea leaves and find 1500 digit prime numbers, does that mean I'm all wet? Or dowsing to continue the moisture theme? Discovery in mathematics (and science as well) is not legitimate or not depending on the methods used, but on the results obtained. My new string theory which unites quantum mechanics and general relativity would still be the best available (assuming it makes testable predictions which are experimentally found) even if I got it from my cat -- the one with the string jones. I agree with Arvindn, with reservation. ww 19:29, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

detail on illegality under US law

Here's the point: U.S. courts have ruled that it is illegal under the DCMA to distribute the DeCSS code, which can be used to decrypt DVDs. This entry notes that there is a large prime number which is equivalent to the hexadecimal representation of a gzip compressed form of the DeCSS C source code. This number, if downloaded, converted to binary, and uncompressed, would produce the DeCSS source, which could be compiled and used to decrypt DVDs. Thus it is presumably illegal to publish this number, which would amount to distributing the DeCSS code. Hence the web page which lists the twenty largest prime numbers identified by the technique used to find this prime would violate the DCMA.

I don't think the table of primes in itself would be illegal, but telling somebody "take the third prime from this table, decode it as hex and unzip, and you have DeCSS" would be illegal. AxelBoldt 01:38 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)

derived work rubric under copyright law

I suppose it's related to the concept of "derived work" that's found in copyright law. If the number was obtained by transforming the DeCSS code, and supplied with instructions on how to convert it back to DeCSS, I suppose it would be found illegal. If the same number appeared in a list of primes which was plausibly claimed to be produced and published for some reason unrelated to DeCSS then I suppose it would be found legal. But as noted above, any digital work can be written as a number, and whether it's legal to put a given number on your website will depend on whether someone can argue that it was created as a derived work. This is just speculation, when dealing with copyright, who knows? ( 18:08, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

URLs and blocking due to protest

The last two URLs don't work. Edward 00:05, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hmm, they do for me. Odd. Lupin 09:54, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Both of them redirect me to [1] (http://fatphil.org/errors/403.html), you don't get that? Edward 16:14, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Apparently he detects which IPs are from countries supporting the Iraq war and blocks them! Arvindn 16:57, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Exactly. So I put the warning text back, with a notation not to remove it unless you've seen the protest before. I've set myself a monthly reminder to check it. TreyHarris 18:50, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Image

This article so needs a photo of one of the illegal prime T-shirts - David Gerard 15:14, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

DG, very good idea. Anyone got one? ww 19:29, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Dirichlet's theorem

The article states, "The existence of infinitely many such primes is guaranteed by Dirichlet's theorem." It would be nice to mention why it follows from Dirichlet's theorem - it is currently explained better in Prime number. Dan Gardner 12:51, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

How likely is it for a code file to be a prime number?? lysdexia 09:48, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Unlikely. ^_~ -- Schnee 12:46, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Actually more likely than one would think - probability of an N bit file being prime is about 1/N (that's the prime number theorem). Arvindn 21:20, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Really? Isn't it actually about ln 2/N? Whatever... Through the article, it speaks of "the" illegal prime. Aren't there multiple illegal primes? (multiple versions of the DeCSS and other codes that are primes.) --Fermatprime 22:25, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean about the probability, as log 2/N is negative. As for "the" prime, one of the illegal primes is special because its the one that is archived on primepages.org. This aspect is easily missed, but the major reason for the fuss about the number is because it is archived in the large prime database and they (arguably) have perfectly reasonable response to a takedown notice. At least that's my understanding. Arvindn 04:11, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, I guess you meant (log 2)/N. I'm a theory-head, so I tend to ignore constants all too often :) Arvindn 04:13, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The number!

I've added the number, as listed in The Register. (They've had it up for three years, there's no reason we shouldn't.) - David Gerard 08:23, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

: Wait - is the 154th digit a "4" or an "8"?

There are two prime numbers mentioned in the text: the source code and an executable. Which one is 'the number'? 202.37.96.11 21:22, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)