09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

The Funny Side

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

The freedom constant

I'd like to coin the number 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, better known by its hexadecimal representation 0x09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 the freedom constant:

freedom := 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

What's so special about freedom then?

Social Relevancy

In the United States of America, a private consortium has taken out to censor freedom, or in other words to wipe it off the net!
Knowing nothing of US laws, I'd guess that this country grants ownership of integers to private entities. Perhaps their government sells the numbers by the billions in order to increase their tax revenue to fund their many wars like "war on terror", "war on iraq", "war against piracy", "war against privacy", "war against free speech", "war against 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0", ...?
There must be some registry in that country, where companies can apply for their very own favorite 16-byte number. Their government then grants a monopoly to such firms on the numbers they have registered and paid for!
If a court in the US were to force people to remove 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 from the net, would it mean that this company just bought freedom away from the US government? I sure hope freedom didn't come cheap; because it's now gone forever. Incidentally, didn't freedom originate from the american people? How did their governemnt steal it away from then in the first place? Were they watching the Superbowl as this happened?
Anyone else who dares to publish or use such a privileged number would get hunted down by the proverbial net police (special squad, of course! After all, they're dangerous terr'ists and, *gasp*, pirates, just using a number that has been legitimately sold out of the public domain by the US government! How dare they, those punks?!).
Offenders will be speedily extradited to a place called Numerical Bay for questioning -- a very special place where normal mathematical rules don't apply (for example: in Numerical Bay, for all a,b in N: a+b=42, this theorem can't be appealed before any mathematics university professor! ever!)!
Maybe the US government is actively encouraging its citizens to buy numbers, maybe as a substitute for war bonds? Every patriotic American should rush to buy some hot 16-byte numbers! "Hurry guys, get them while they're hot; supply won't last forever, and we've got so many wars to win! Keep up with the buying, so we can keep up with the killing!"
Of course, the US can live by the funniest laws they like to. That's what Freedom (with a big 'F', not our freedom constant) is all about: the Pursuit of Numb(er)ness.
But what about us here in the rest of the world? Americans may be prevented from publishing those forbidden numbers in their own country, but all those courageous bloggers in the US who kept posting them there anyway despite the huge personal risks, deserve a big hats off and respect for their act of Civil Disobedience. A long overdue Civil Disobedience... that's what this great country has been founded upon and made it free in the first place.
Fortunately, the Internet spans many more legislations, not all of them as weird as that of the United States of America. And as far as I know, even if all governments are constantly broke financially, not all of them have yet resorted to selling 16-byte numbers to corporations or to individuals. Not yet! But, pssst... don't give them any weird ideas how to improve their tax revenues!
Now imagine how it would be like, if the whole world agreed that 16-byte numbers were merchandises, to be sold and bought by whomever had the money for it! Quite some hairy questions pop up:
- If I bought a number, will every government on the planet recognize my exclusive right to publish it? Even Iran? Even DPRK? No, really? They too, Brutii?
- Are those special numbers GUIDs (global unique identifiers), and can they be reserved by only one individual or entity at a time? Are those numbers the new IPv6 addresses we'd been hearing about all along?
- Can I buy every number I feel like, or would there be some global numbering plan like what's been in use for the POTS or ISDN? Or IPv6? Oh, will the prefix of freedom (09 F9...) belong to the US, so that the US government, by proxy of its freedom grabbing private entity, could rightfully claim international ownership to it? Wouldn't it be funny if the 09 F9 belonged to a champion of freedom of expression like DPRK? (Yuck!)
- Must we change the laws of mathematics to accomodate ownership of numbers? Let's declare that N has now holes! For example, if freedom was gone, would it be forbidden to compute freedom+1 or freedom-1? What would freedom + 1 - 1 be equal to anyway? Oops, that number doesn't exist, mathematician! Move on, nothing to see here! Or, under the much harsher US regime: "mathematician, you've computed an illegal number, prepare to be arrested on grounds of high seas piracy!"
- Fortunately, those forbidden numbers are certainly published at an easy to find place that's internationally recognized, so nobody can use them unknowingly. The canonical place for all numbers-that-are-no-more is a website of the UN. Sadly, accessing it results in 404 Not found errors. Was their webmaster arrested and renditioned to Numerical Bay as well? Poor guy must be burning in numerical hell now.
- Until the UN site is fixed and all sold out numbers are online again, we're bound to getting the Vogon treatment:
  "What? You didn't know that the number you've published is forbidden? Nonsense! They've been published on Alpha Centauri for years now, within easy reach of you lowly earthlings. You could have known that your number has been forbidden, if you cared to go down to the basement of the Forbidden Numbers Licensing Authority on Alpha Centauri, and looked them up yourselves! Prepare to be obliterated."

There's certainly much more to it than meets the eye... Film at eleven (both in HD DVD and BluRay formats, not quite viewable under Linux and FreeBSD yet... But that's another story, and I'd be 9 times doomed, if disgruntled users of those free operating systems weren't discussing this on some forum out there in hyperspace).

Mathematical Meaning

Mathematically, freedom looks like a pretty boring number:

freedom is an integer, like infinitely many other integers.
It fits into 16 bytes, or 128 bits, so it's one number out of 2^128 (or 340282366920938463463374607431768211456) 16-bytes numbers.
It's not a prime number (being a multiple of 2).
Its factorization is: 2^6 * 5 * 19 * 12043 * 216493 * 836256503069278983442067, or, in hex: 0x02^0x06 * 0x05 * 0x13 * 0x2f0b * 0x34dad * 0xb1158e4d70aa6db84e93. Have those prime factors a special relevancy?
Are freedom-1 and freedom+1 prime numbers? The reason I'm asking this is because, in cryptography, we often encounter expressions like ((2^(p1*p2))-1) and ((2^(p1*p2))+1).
It's hard to factorize big numbers, but it would be thrilling if someone came up with the factorization of freedom (Done, using FreeBSD's /usr/games/factor and verified with Python), freedom-1 and freedom+1 (apparently hard, but I'm not the NSA), since it could hint at some Diffie-Hellman or RSA/DSA-style of encryption. Perhaps some kind of distributed project like seti@home (freedom@home? 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0@home?) could help speed up the process?
freedom could also be a key for elliptic curve cryptography, which is less popular, but allegedly more robust? But of course, all this would be totally surprising.
Last, but not least, freedom could also be a mere random number (like some ephemeral keys) without any further (mathematical) meaning at all. That's probably a philosophical question as well...