Boing Boing has a post about a program which takes two arbitrary binary files and "munges" them into a third binary file. It can then take any two of those three files and produce the missing file.
It sounds to me like a simple XOR! Moreover, I'm sure I've heard this idea before. I searched a little.
In 2000, Slashdot posted a link to "A method of free speech on the Internet: random pads" which describes using XOR to hide file contents.
In 1995, RISKS-FORUM Digest had a message from Erann Gat titled "The source of semantic content." In it, Erann describes a way to transmit forbidden content using a one-time pad. The resulting thread has interesting discussion.
Erann claims that people using this system would be able to deny that they were propagating forbidden content. Barry Margolin points out, "unless they actually didn't know what the purpose of those random bit streams were, they would be perjuring themselves." David Harpe says, "During the trial, the reconstructed image is all the jury will see, understand or remember. They will fall asleep during the expert witness testimony regarding public key cryptography."
I have two remarks of my own. One is that it's interesting how in nine years "forbidden content" went from pornography to copyrighted works, and it may be about to go back.
The second thing this brings up to me is the nature of computer evidence in court. The police can seize my computer and tell the court that they found on it whatever they want to say. I have no way to prove that the evidence was planted. Of course, this isn't that different from the past. It's not more difficult to plant information on a computer than it is to plant damning paper.
4 comments:
Hello Kyle,
Your derivation is indeed quite correct. However, you are missing some of the more recient developments. After David Madore's paper, there was an extention done on the idea that did not stress "encryption" or even information hiding. Instead it discusses "multi-use" encoding and its relationship to traditional copyright axioms. Multi-use encoding is where stored date represents many files simultaniously.
The paper was done by a friend of mine and is called On Copyrightable Numbers... The paper is actually stored in multi-use format on a demonstration site called Shock. All data on the shock site is used to simultaniously represent more than one copyrighted piece of content.
The demo implementation is called The OFF System and the code and data is available on sourceforge
The monolith project was initially a spin off of that work. I always thought it mis-explained the concept, by resorting to the well worn "They're only numbers" argument.
Otherwise, a great history!
Capi
While I haven't looked deeply at the system discussed in the previous comment, it makes me wonder whether they've read "What Colour are your bits?" and "Colour, social beings, and undecidability" which were quite a bit better than what I wrote here. Those articles convinced me completely that mucking about with encodings as a way of meddling with copyright is a dead end. Of course, I could be wrong.
While I hadn't read those particular threads, I have been through that exercise time and time again.
The gist of the argument is, "It's not the bits, it's the creative work as defined by copyright law. Anything that can regenerate a human perceived representation of the creative work is likey to infringe. Lawyers and courts don't think like programmers."
That is why, the team took the time to actually put together content and burn it to CD. According to traditional understanding, there must exist things that are on the "Shock CD" and things that are not on the Shock CD.
I encourage you to download the CD from sourceforge and burn it. That is the only way to really grasp the concept.
Once you have burned the CD and are absolutely sure what is on it. Then take the time and try and establish legal ownership for each item. You will find it quite impossible.
When you are done, I can show you how to retrieve things that can't possibly be on the CD. Creative works that weren't created until long after your CD was burned into immortality.
See my new post on this subject.
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