TWL #7: This Number is Illegal

85650789657397829 + 1402 more digits is an illegal number. To understand why this is, we need to learn a little bit of cryptology, a little bit of math, and a little bit of programming.

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Music provided Epidemic Sound
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[wshtb]

America, the land of the free, the home of the brave.*

* except this one number.

[ThShrike]

0:19 why was "gay bomb" on there three times?

[_Vengeance_]

"I'm in jail for murder, what's your story?"
"I wrote some random numbers on a piece of paper"
"YOU MONSTER!"

[NotSoMelancholy]

I just imagine some 6 year old slamming random numbers into the keyboard. Then some cops bust down the door arresting him because he ending up writing the illegal number.

[sirpsychosussy]

Of course you can be in a possession of a number.
The other day I was cleaning my collection of multiples of 19, when I noticed that my rare 3420 was missing.

[dragonc_]

You could say it's a 'crime' number, I'm sorry, i had to.

[BenKill]

I didn't know my password was Illegal

[probe-f]

2:19 is my brain when you asked me to multiply 11 and 13.

[Zerio]

Now that's what I call a prime crime.

[bobrichardson]

"You are under arrest for suspicion of math use"

[Dj-rekv]

Teacher: Okay class what’s the answer to this question

Student: * says the illegal number *

FBI: OPEN UP JIMMY BROKE THE LAW

[justsayapple]

2:58 (on the right) he's watching...

[stonebrix]

Thanks alot... I went up to a cop and said the illegal number. They raided my house, took my family from me and now I live in Mexico so the government won't find me, all thanks to you.

[stoutyyyy]

how does one "possess" a number?

[vikaskundbi]

Im a soccer player and i want this number on my Jersey

[bri_oni]

2:05
1x143=143
easy, only took me about 3 seconds

[wallacoloo]

Alternative summary: Jon Lech Johansen wrote and published a computer program that completely defeated DVD copy protection, allowing anyone to clone DVDs. Because this program was designed for the primary purpose of committing a crime (I am in no way supporting IP law - just speaking factually here), it was illegal to reproduce and was thereby censored. Phil Carmody realized one could just as easily distribute the program as a very long number, rather than in text form. If he could make the number _novel_, then it couldn't be censored because it now had legally valid uses. So he found a way to represent the program in the form of a very large prime number whose discovery was valuable to mathematics in general, and published that number instead.

Well, that was the most interesting part of this illegal number business to me (which, btw both the original code and the number are now reproduced in a variety of places with no legal repercussion). I was disappointed that the video managed to gloss over pretty much all of this story.

[trumpetperson]

0:32 in an instant you can tell at least one of the digits he changed. It's supposed to be prime but it ends in 4.

[ZerMemry]

Cryptography would be the correct term to use.

[StarWarsNerd]

I feel like I've learned more about prime numbers a minute into this video than I ever learned during my 5 years of secondary school.