Check out digg.com; thousands and thousands of users were upset today (~50,000 diggs between all the posts) after digg deleted a story (the most popular story ever) and banned a user over the HD-DVD key being posted. The membership flipped out and everyone started submitting stories with the key included -- and now the first four or five pages are filled with the stories over there. Apparently digg received a cease and desist letter and complied. Now they've reversed their position saying they will do what the users want even if it means they have to get shut down. Even slashdot has joined the madness, posting the key as one of the "tags" to their stories.

 

Interesting thing, the power of the people.

really nice to know that people will not tolerate censorship and like the free flow of information. this make me happy.

cool, hope digg survives.

 

anti-copy stuff (etc) sucks. I (and most normal users) may not be able to copy stuff (preventing lots of stuff that i'm legally entitled to do), but the pirates certainly can (thus invalidating the whole system).

 

course, if i want to make any (legal) copies of something i own (backup copies, copys on different medias, etc), i now have to download it via bit-torrent, thus helping the pirating system survive

 

so, yeah, anti-copy stuff is stoopid, and the quicker the HD-DVD encryption system is completely torn to tatters, the better.

lets face it anyway, if your releasing any publically available encrypted media then there is always going to be a bit where its streaming through a ire unencrypted where it can be copied onto a disk or computer or whatever (think a DVD player hooked up to a TV through a coax cable. plug the coax into a a computer and you can just record from there.

One of the problems (in terms of designing, not as in the fact that DRM is EVIL) is that as soon as you release the hardware you are stuck with that encryption until your next big media upgrade, so as soon as it's cracked it's basically useless, DVD-HD and blu-ray have already been broken, they should learn to just give up.

lets face it anyway, if your releasing any publically available encrypted media then there is always going to be a bit where its streaming through a ire unencrypted where it can be copied onto a disk or computer or whatever (think a DVD player hooked up to a TV through a coax cable. plug the coax into a a computer and you can just record from there.

 

I thought one of the points of HDTVs was that they had onboard encryption stuff.

 

so, yeah, the signal will still be scrambled en route from the DVD player to the HDTV.

 

afaik, modern TVs can play at HD resolution... it's just that the DVDs wont send the HD signal to the TV unless it reports as a HDTV, and then will send it encrypted.

 

Not sure about that tho...

well then, you can just copy the disk bit for bit

Censorship has been a persistent problem with Digg. In this case their excuse was complying with a C/D, meaning they couldn't see the stupidity of it themselves and acted in their own senseless self-interest, all the time touting the virtues of an open community.

 

http://reddit.com is a better digg