TechWag

The Digg community went wild yesterday when a member posted the AACS key on their web site and then Dugg it. Like we all do.

Digg from all notices got a Cease and Desist notice, took down the offending link, it got reposted, then the account got banned. From there the Digg community went a tad aggressive and 1. Many people then reposted the AACS key about 1000 times and dugg it. 2. got all over Digg’s butt for censorship of someone else’s work. Note, the original article is still up on the person’s blog, it is completely Google searchable, and this kind of information is about impossible to censor. Just ask MPAA and DVD John what their take on this one is. This is the story, as we understand it so far.

This morning as we stumbled through the Digg community blog we found this from one of the Digg owners: (We copy the message it in total, otherwise it will make no sense, to track this thread, go to Digg).

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Source: Digg

First on this one I want to stand on a tall mountain with an excellent echo and scream “BRAVO!” to Digg, this takes courage, and we really need more people in media to have courage. There is not enough praise on this one that we can heap upon Digg for just “Say NO!”. If the owners of the data really want it removed, they need to move all the way through the internet, starting with the posts on individual web sites, silencing Digg will not silence Reddit, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, Wordpress, or other places this information will be found.

Two, as I reminisce this reminds me of the DVD-John case where the code to bypass DVD protection was censored on the internet, only to end up in T-Shirts and other materials as a string of binary code much like the offending key that is causing such pain on the internet looks like this in Binary

“10011111100100010001000000101001110101110100111000
110101101111011000010000010101011011000101011000
11010101101000100011000000”

If you get busted for “09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0” try the binary translation above, if we got the translation wrong, let us know, we had to use a calculator. Just a thought.

Tags: news, business //