I’m digging 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
From Kevin Rose on digg’s blog:
Digg the Blog » Blog Archive » Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0:
If you read digg, you may have seen something like this last night around midnight:
it turns out, those 48 little characters that everyone was appending to everything happen to be a key to unlock HD-DVDs, thereby giving people the ability to decode them and convert them to simple video files to be easily passed around. The same thing happened in 1999 when Jon Lech Johansen released DeCSS with his crew amidst a hail of lawsuits. The about page on Jon’s blog has a great timeline of his efforts. Not too shabby for a high-school drop-out.
His work has directly resulted in such useful utilities as Handbrake, MacTheRipper, and a whole slew of DVD playback software that wouldn’t otherwise exist on Linux1. In fact, the impact of that one bit of open source software has been felt on every user who’s ever tried to copy a DVD to their iPod or PSP.
Ok, enough ancient history. What’s happening on Digg right now is interesting from a social aspect. Someone, earnestly posts the key to decrypt HD-DVDs to Digg. Digg gets a call from a lawyer telling them to take it down. Digg complies. And then a whole bunch of 12 year olds start rampaging over the site dropping the key in as many places as they can. Kevin Rose is faced with two choices: he can take the site down, probably killing off a good chunk of their user base while they figure out how to scrub the data, or they can leave it up and invoke the wrath of the MPAA. They chose to do the latter.
Army of Digg, I salute you! Your careless act of site trashing has done its job and now Digg must follow-through on your actions. Kudos, brave warriors. In time-to-come, we may be able to enjoy HD-DVD content on our cell-phones as god intended it.
Also, to the men and women who run Digg, I salute you too. I expect the trials to be entertaining.
1 – Apparently newer Linuxes like Fedora Core 7 and Ubuntu actually have legal DVD playback software. Someone ponied up to get real licenses on there so they could be considered “legal”. All you other linuxes, you’re still breaking the law (I salute you!).
1 Comment