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Comment by jihadjihad | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's crazy! It is a wild concept that certain numbers could be deemed "illegal" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

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Any piece of data can be represented as a single number. In the limit your entire computer is a single number (all those 0s and 1s can either be interpreted as separate numbers or as one gigantic number).

If any data is ever illegal then by association certain numbers are also illegal.

EDIT: The Wikipedia article points this out.

It isn't the number that is illegal, it's the number plus information on how to use it.

child porn images are numbers

You're not wrong, but this is a slippery slope to go down.

8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?"

[...]

like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Not really. We've decided as a society that information can be illegal. Whether that information is encrypted, obfuscated, or whatever, it is still illegal. Everything is a number if you abstract it enough and any number can be transformed into any other number easily. As long as it can be shown that the numbers you're publishing are intentionally being published for the purpose of providing illegal information, you're breaking the law.

The legal system is not like a computer system and tech people who think they can fool it with simple tricks like it was a computer system are in for an unpleasant surprise.

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