McCarthy return under new clothes
Xcott Craver
caj at math.niu.edu
Thu Aug 27 09:54:03 PDT 1998
On 27 Aug 1998 jdean1 at 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
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list