................................. To leave Commie, hyper to http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html ................................. hee hee. fuck the MPAA. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/17/1639250&mode=nocomment Illegal Prime Number Unzips to DeCSS Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 18, @12:39PM from the allright-thats-pretty-friggin-clever dept. Bob9113 writes: "A person named Phil Carmody has found a very interesting prime number. When converted to hexadecimal, the result is a gzip that contains a DeCSS implementation. I've posted a short bit of Java here that takes the prime as a command line parameter and dumps the result to standard out if you want to test it." Very clever, I just wish the background on that page wasn't headache inducing. http://www.utm.edu/research/primes//curios/48565...29443.html http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/glossary/Illegal.html Phil Carmody decided to make a version of DeCSS which was a prime number. First Carmody took the original anonymous version of the DeCSS C-code and gzip'ed it (a standard UNIX program for making files smaller). Suppose we call the resulting number k. By Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progression, we know that for each fixed integer b relatively prime to k, there are infinitely many primes ak+b. For technical reasons, if we choose a to be a power of 256 larger than b, the resulting number can still be unzipped to get the original file. This means there are infinitely many prime numbers which yield the same code. These include: k*256^2+2083 and k*256^211+99. At the time these were found they both were large enough to fit on the list of largest known primes (because of the method of proof). If distributing code is illegal, and these numbers contain the code, does that make these number illegal?
