From: Xcott Craver <caj@math.niu.edu>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 09:54:03 -0700 (PDT)
To: jdean1@nomvs.lsumc.edu
Subject: Re: McCarthy return under new clothes
In-Reply-To: <19980827064602846@nomvs.lsumc.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980827114332.6192A-100000@baker>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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