Comment by philjohn 6 months ago
And don't forget the amazing workaround Zimmerman of PGP fame came up with - the source code in printed form was protected 1A speech, so it was published, distributed, and then scanned and OCR'd outside the US - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...
I hope this time we finally get a Supreme Court ruling that export controls on code are unconstitutional, instead of the feds chickening out like last time
Using 2d barcodes you can fit ~20MB per page. Front and back you could probably fit a model that violated the rule on less than a thousand pages.
Edit: maybe 10k pages
Printers that can keep all the color channels lined up all the way down to their tightest dot pitch are few and far between. That is why piql used black and white for the boxing code they used to print out all of github. I'm not sure why greyscale wasn't used.
> Printers that can keep all the color channels lined up all the way down to their tightest dot pitch are few and far between.
It only takes one for a PoC. It only takes few to establish a service. Spatial and color accuracy is going to be a challenge, but I imagine there already exist methods to correct for that - e.g. printing reference patterns along with the data, so the scanner/digitizer can calibrate to it on the fly.
And don’t forget Thawte which ended up selling strong SSL outside the US, cornering the international market thanks to US restrictions, and getting bought by Verisign for $600M.