On 27 Aug 1998 jdean1@nomvs.lsumc.edu wrote:
Are you sure there was nothing that could be construed as pornographic on your PC? Nothing in the cache? Nothing deleted but not overwritten? Nothing hiding in the unused space as the end of a sector? Have you never accessed a page only to find it contains pornography (or an ad for the same)?
Further, as the net becomes more and more integrated with your OS, to the point that FTP/HTTP sites are accessable from your command-line prompt as if they were just really slow drives, will we see some truly clueless customs officials arrest you because they can find the Playboy site *in* your computer? And how about random noise? Random strings could be ciphertext. If I design PRNGs, and have my laptop drive stuffed with huge random files for DIEHARD analysis, would that one day be illegal to carry across a border? From an information-theoretic perspective, we have the asymptotic equipartition property telling us that almost all strings are almost equally extremely suspicious. Will a dartboard w/ the alphabet on it be vanishingly unlikely to generate a message one could legally carry outside the US? -Caj