
What Colour are your bits? (2004) - sysk
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23/
======
dexen
Reminds me of jwz's problems [1] with broadcasting music via Youtube. When
broadcasting from his DNA Lounge, he was greeted with the dreaded "Warning:
Your stream will be terminated if you continue broadcasting content that you
are not authorized to use."

His take on it: _Because that company is run totally by robots, and there 's
apparently no mechanism to tell them, "Hey robot, STFU, I pay licensing fees
for all of this music and it's totally legal for me to do this."_

Indeed, what Colour were his bits?

[1]
[http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/09/03.html](http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/09/03.html)

------
userbinator
This concept of "Colour" causing difficulties exists only because of the
extreme flexibility and "genericness" of digital data, currently unparalleled
by anything else in the real world. If/when technologies to manipulate
physical objects generically at the level of atoms become feasible and
widespread, we might be asking "What Colour are your atoms?"

~~~
digi_owl
In other words, a Star Trek replicator will make mincemeat of the idea of
copyright...

~~~
praptak
Or the other way around. Existence of replicators will create laws forbidding
you to whittle yourself a shape of a Mercedes.

~~~
ryandrake
Or the other other way around: Star Trek style replicators will never see the
light of day. As soon as the technology even REMOTELY gets close, everyone
with a financial interest in keeping physical goods scarce (basically all
manufacturing companies), will collectively come down on it like a ton of
bricks. If you think the record and movie industry lobbying effort against
sharing is powerful, imagine basically every manufacturing company in
existence joining in.

~~~
digi_owl
As long as some political suit somewhere things that it will give them a leg
up in the rat race, that lobbying will be shown the door.

------
rayiner
Much of the article is non-sensical, but this part got my attention:

> It makes a difference not only what bits you have, but where they came from.
> There's a very interesting Web page illustrating the Coloured nature of bits
> in law on the US Naval Observatory Web site. They provide information on
> that site about when the Sun rises and sets and so on... but they also
> provide it under a disclaimer saying that this information is not suitable
> for use in court. If you need to know when the Sun rose or set for use in a
> court case, then you need an expert witness - because you don't actually
> just need the bits that say when the Sun rose. You need those bits to be
> Coloured with the Colour that allows them to be admissible in court, and the
> USNO doesn't provide that. It's not just a question of accuracy - we all
> know perfectly well that the USNO's numbers are good. It's a question of
> where the numbers came from. It makes perfect sense to a lawyer that where
> the information came from is important, in fact maybe more important than
> the information itself. The law sees Colour.

Let's consider a slightly different hypothetical. I tell a police officer:
"the blood on the carpet is that of the accused." A forensic scientist tells a
police officer: "the blood on the carpet is that of the accused." Are these
the same bits? By the reasoning of the article, yes, but the law rightfully
treats them completely differently. The source of the bits goes to
reliability.

In fact, the disclaimer on the UNSO's website explains why the data is not
reliable for litigation:
[http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/lawyers.php](http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/lawyers.php)
("The data are _computed_ and are not reports of _observed or recorded_
events. The computations assume certain conditions and the data might
therefore not be relevant to the facts at issue in a specific case."). The
mistake made by the author is precisely why courts are wary to take judicial
notice of random facts on the internet--even when the data is accurate, it is
easy to fail to take account of relevant limitations arising from the nature
of the data or the data collection.

And contrary of the author's assertion--computers care a lot about where bits
come from. The whole point of things like GPG signatures on digital downloads
is because we trust some sources and not other sources, even when the bits
might seem to be the same.

~~~
digi_owl
A GPG signature is metadata (color).

My string of zero and your string of zero may have different GPG signatures,
but they are both strings of zero. Stripped of metadata (color) there is no
way to tell who the source was.

~~~
couchand
Isn't the signature itself additional bits? This whole distinction between
data and metadata is farcical: metadata is a subtype of data, they are not
disjoint.

~~~
digi_owl
Metadata is a sticky note on a sheet of paper. It may make some statement
about what the paper it is stuck to, but it is not written on the paper
itself.

Metadata basically means data about data.

The core issue is that if you have a string of bits (say a long line of
zeroes), you can't say from that string of bits alone where it came from, how
it was created or anything of that sort. You will need metadata/color/sticky-
note to tell you this.

Yes you have file formats that can carry the metadata alongside the data (id3
tags in mp3 files for instance). But even if you strip out that metadata the
data itself is still there and still usable for whatever you want to do with
it.

~~~
couchand
That still doesn't explain how metadata is color in this context. From the OP:

 _Those questions are perhaps answerable by "metadata", but metadata suggests
to me additional bits attached to the bits in question, and I'd like to
emphasize that I'm talking here about something that is not properly captured
by bits at all and actually cannot be, ever._

~~~
digi_owl
Hrmf, has it really been that long since i read the article. Had completely
forgotten that he touched on the subject of metadata. I stand, corrected, i
guess...

~~~
couchand
Though now, after re-reading the author's statement, I'm not sure I agree with
all of it. How can anything not be representable with bits? It's just a matter
of finding an encoding scheme.

I guess perhaps the author's point is that this coding scheme must be
communicated through some side-channel, coloring the bits. The bits themselves
could tell you, for instance, which version of a given protocol to use, but
couldn't indicate the protocol out of the blue without some other agreement.

And this gets back to the discussion of intent. These bits over here are
colored by intent. You can codify that color in bits over there, but those are
still different bits, and those bits still need to have color information.
It's colors all the way down!

~~~
tormeh
Encode the feeling of love into bits. Look, I'm stupid. I just wanted to say
that once.

~~~
cogburnd02
4C 6F 76 65

------
aphrax
the game Paranoia sounds really interesting, anything similar that's still
around?

~~~
aardvark179
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1990654819/paranoia-
rpg](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1990654819/paranoia-rpg) this,
hopefully.

~~~
aphrax
thanks so much - this look to be my cup of tea!

------
tmikaeld
[2004]

I don't like this new HN trend of not adding the year of the article. This is
Hacker NEWS not Hacker Old.

~~~
smcl
I think this has surfaced again because of some of the discussion around this
article on The Pirate Bay:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728011).
I think it's a good article whether or not it was written ten years ago.

~~~
louhike
He disapproves the lack of the year in the title, not the presence of the
article on HN.

