If there was a hypothetical hard drive that was encrypted with a theoretically unbreakable encryption with an unknown key (perhaps that was randomly generated by something analog), is information stored on the drive?
Or, in theory, if data stored in a drive was physically impossible to read, is there data being stored at all, or is being able to read it a prerequisite for it to be information/data at all
( Physics nerds stay out, I know what I’m asking and want to hear computer dweebs think about it :P
More accurately, just don’t bias the jury , so to speak)
yes, there is data on the drive. encrypting the drive alters its contents, so even if it was blank before it isn’t anymore. is there information? yes, because even if it’s blank, we can only have full information on the state of the drive if it were to be encrypted (assuming it’s not revealed some other way, but there’s still the confirmation on the drive).
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.
I think this misses something listennui pointed out in her original post, which is, to paraphrase, “does information have to be readable to be information?” I could write the sentence “asdl;kfj mfj asdjlnfkjas asdfkj” which definitely has letters, and perhaps, theoretically, could be decoded into something, but it also holds no meaning - no “information.” A perfectly encrypted disk with no/an unknown decryption key is functionally identical to gibberish. In this way, it differs from the tree-falling thought experiment because the encryption modifies the data in a way that the (non)presence of an observer does not modify the treefall.
Drill is definitely right when they say we have to define “information” here.
For the keasmash
I would disagree and say the imformation stored is there. And language isnt required to store imformation the keasmash stores the order of letters typed whitch is imformation and the order of letters typed stores possible movements of your hands to type this
The differnce i think is in imformation being data or imformation being useable
As to the origional question.
There is data and its not verry usefull but its still data
There is also data on the data whitch is tempirarily within the hard drive
Eg
If the data is being constantly rewrittwn that tells us imformation on the type of encryption and likewise if its not
Yeah, to expand on this, I also agree that information doesn’t necessarily have to be readable to be defined as “information”, at least in computer science. All that matters to me in this case is if the 1s and 0s on the hard drive have been flipped a certain way. That’s it.
I think the concept of “decryption” is really interesting because I’m not totally sure that there’s such a thing as a “correct” decryption?
Like in an epistemological sense, is decryption recovering the original information, or is it creating new information?
Suppose it’s WW2 and you have an encrypted German naval transmission. If you decrypt it improperly, but your flawed decryption by sheer happenstance still gives you the position of the U-Boats, what happened?
I think that’s why I get all parallax-y sometimes. The world is a cypher text and I can “decrypt” any number of different meanings from it, but is there a “true” meaning I’m trying to find or do I just want to grab whichever one will help me hit the U-Boats?
All that matters to me in this case is if the 1s and 0s on the hard drive have been flipped a certain way.
I can see the thread here but it doesn’t account for the idea of an “empty” disk. “all zeroes” is a “certain way,” but practically we intentionally differentiate between “empty” and “filled,” for any number of reasons.
The canonical argument here I think would be to note that marking space as “empty” is, itself, information, but when all things are information, the concept gets fuzzy.
Maybe the idea of “intent” factors in somewhere? lilian touches on it when they say
is there a “true” meaning I’m trying to find or do I just want to grab whichever one will help me hit the U-Boats?
Does “information” require intentionality or just usefulness? Does it require either of those at all?
Looking at these two questions, I think the answers are both simpler than they may appear! So here’s my (unqualified, but still very nerdy) take on it:
Yes, data that can’t be accessed or decrypted is still data. Not having the means to obtain something in the moment doesn’t automatically make it invalid, let alone nonexistent. How else would new data be discovered other than figuring out how to decrypt previously inaccessible information? Besides, even if the data stored was absolutely unobtainable, it exists regardless of our ability to obtain it.
Yes, data that can’t be read is also – you guessed it – still data, and so isn’t dependent on our ability to read it in order for it to exist. In other words, data is a particular set of information that exists independently of our own judgement. The main reason data is so valuable to us is because of how it can be perceived, organized, or modified beyond its initial state. This sentiment, however, doesn’t automatically render data obsolete if we fail to do any of these things.
I agree with this, it was one of the edge cases I was thinking of. But at the end of the day, discussing this to me has next to no meaning (though, I do understand that is the point of this discussion). To me, personally, the information need not have inherent meaning to both humans or computers in order for it to be considered information in this context. Of course if someone came up to me and said gibberish in all senses of the word, I wouldn’t say the same. It depends.
Addendum, as I am taking a break from my bike ride: Intent also only matters to me in the context of human expression. For example, if by some freak accident cosmic rays from the sun happened to flip the bits on a hard drive to say “Help! I am being help captive inside of the sun!” for all intents and purposes I would consider this information, even though there was zero will from the sun itself to provide this information, nor is their any usefulness in the sentence, as such a situation is impossible (at the moment).
To go back to your earlier example, you mention a sentence of gibberish, random letters: “asdl;kfj mfj asdjlnfkjas asdfkj” Say I put that sentence on that hard drive, and assigned it the meaning of “I could really go for a pint right now.” To you, the sentence is gibberish, to me it holds meaning. Does it hold information? I think so. A less extreme example is slang or dialects, where certain sentences or words can hold meaning to members of a culture but be gibberish to outsiders. But now I’m getting away from computer science and more into linguistics. The point is, for humans sentences can hold meaning even if logically they shouldn’t, which is why I separate the contexts here.
I feel this too with respect to cultural or spiritual practices; there has been a whole lot of borrowing, removal from context, cultural appropriation (as to what constitutes appropriation vs transmission is a whole discussion I don't really want to start here and it's tangential to this point). People talk about authentic cultural practice as good and inauthentic as bad but really, I don't see much distinction between misunderstanding and differently understanding. If I should decide to celebrate some holiday practiced in, I don't know, Finland, but I do it in a way that doesn't follow those traditions all that well, I have, consciously or otherwise, created something new that, IMO, if I find some value in it, is valid.
Or to bring it back: meaning made from a misunderstanding is still meaning and I think still valid!
But then on the other hand: I'm reminded of something that was said during the GDQ stream last week about how what you really don't want is learning the wrong way to do something that still works. You end up trying to repeat the success, performing a section of the Kaizo level in a way that is maybe more difficult than the intended way, and might leave you in an untenable position for future segments.
Or in your example, great, your incorrect decryption lucked out and told you where the U-boats are once. But this likely means you'll keep using it, even if it gives incorrect coordinates in the future!
we want to tug a little bit at the seams of the premise here
we would say, categorically, that there is no such thing. so long as the encryption is reversible and the "data" being stored is not just statistical noise, there will be methods of doing statistical inference on the stored ciphertext to attempt to break the encryption. the only "encryption method" that does not leave room for this sort of analysis would be one that is not actually useful, as it would have to break the information link between the input plaintext and the encrypted ciphertext - effectively just storing random data that cannot be decrypted
so if your premise is such that you're just putting random data onto the drive . . . no that's not storing data, but for it to be encryption it must retain a correlation to the input data in such a way that would necessarily allow it to be broken if given enough time and resources
I was thinking something similar. No matter how good the encryption is, for it to be encryption and not just random noise, there needs to be a way for the data to be turned from the unencrypted state to the encrypted state. Given this information, there must be a way to undo the process (even if doing so by brute force would take longer than the heat death of the universe).
Given that list said
I'm assuming this means that the time to conventionally decrypt it would take longer than the heat death of the universe happening, but even so, the encryption must be reversible, because if someone had the key to the encryption, it could be decrypted. Therefore, since the key exists, it must be possible to find it, given enough time, even if it means brute-forcing the solution
(sorry if this was a bit rambly and repeated the points @ashe made. I didn't have a ton of time to go through and refine the thoughts)
yeah like there are encryption schemes that can produce entirely random data like a one-time pad (XOR’ing or modularly adding the data with a non-repeated, truly random key) but if you throw the key away that’s functionally equivalent to writing random data to disk and the input data being involved is entirely unnecessary to the process
(also it’s not a common sort of encryption, particularly not for a whole disk, as the key needs to be the same length as the input data - any scheme where you’re using a smaller key and generating this with a random number generator will start to introduce a stronger statistical relationship between the input and the output, opening it up to cryptographic analysis)
I just assumed there existed a method where, if trying random keys / all possible keys, you would have a pretty solid chance of getting a seemingly valid message that was completely different than the decrypted info, but seemed to be the decrypted info. In that case, it could be impossible to tell what the actual original data was unless you were to actually know which key was the original. A sort of hidden amongst many potential answers type of thing
Like how in the library of babel, every possible combinations of letters would exist, but for every one complete copy of a given text, there would also be nearly infinite more of the same text, but off by some amount in every possible combination it could be off
then the one time pad fits yeah - for any given encrypted bit of data on the disk there exists a theoretical “key” to produce any and all possible input strings of that length, it’s very library of babel-like
we’re going to say in that case that regardless of what is on the disk, if you’re not preserving the key then you have not meaningfully written the encrypted data to the disk
an operation like that functionally splits the source information into two pieces, one piece is in the key and one piece is in the encrypted text recorded to the disk. if you do that process again but throw away the key you are just writing random data with extra steps
Physics nerds stay out, I know what I’m asking and want to hear computer dweebs think about it :P
, so to speak)
