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Illegal Prime PowerPoint v.X for Mac or earlier .ppt, 729 kb According to the Wikipedia "an illegal prime is a prime number which represents information forbidden to possess or distribute, because when interpreted a particular way, it describes a computer program which bypasses copyright protection schemes. Distribution of that program in the United States is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Illegal primes are a subset of illegal numbers.In 2001 Phil Carmody discovered the first illegal prime number; it's a compressed version of the source code used to decrypt DVDs (DeCSS). By exploitation of the fact that the gzip compression program ignores bytes after the end of a null terminated compressed file, a set of candidate primes was generated, each of which would result in the DeCSS C code when unzipped. Of these several were identified as probable prime using the open source program OpenPFGW, and one of them was proved prime using the ECPP algorithm implemented by the Titanix software. Even at the time of discovery in 2001, this 1401 digit number was too small to be mentioned, so Carmody created a 1905-digit prime which was the tenth largest prime found using ECPP.Following this, Carmody also created another prime, this one directly executable machine language for Linux i386, implementing the same functionality". In April 2007 a consortium for the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) discovered that another cryptographic key had been identified and was being distributed (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0) allowing the decryption of HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. AACS began issuing cease and desist notices. Are numbers and letters illegal, are they free speech, are they art? This PowerPoint may indeed be an illegal PowerPoint, all 361 slides or it could be considered a collection of numbers that really do not deserve all the attention they have been given. Comments
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Phillip Torrone New York City Phillip Torrone is a New York City based author - he is currently the senior editor for MAKE Magazine and contributing editor to Popular Science. In his spare time he designs open source electronics and uses high powered laser beams. |
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