Digg user revolt

[Uraniun235]

OR: when nerds RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

I don't normally visit Digg, but over on another forum someone pointed out that there is apparently a revolt in progress on Digg. Seems that someone posted a story about the HD-DVD crack that had been discovered a couple of months ago, and included the hex code for the volume key.

Someone lawyered up a letter to Digg and Digg - without immediate explanation - swiftly removed the story.

Since then, the Digg userbase has gone apeshit, posting nonstop stories and posts, all of them referencing the code in some fashion or another.

[Phantasee]

Wow. That's awesome.

Pie in the face? Very.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Another demonstration of the best way of ensuring everyone and their dog gets eyeballs on a scrap of information is to leak it onto the internet, then try censoring it off.

Epic Fail.

[Hawkwings]

When do they start selling the T-shirts?

[Uraniun235]

I heard Wired already has them available.

[Old Plympto]

Even Wheaton's got it on his site now, that rogue geek.

[Resinence]

That code is the best thing to happen to linux this year, we can play HD-DVD's finally

[phongn]

Digg concedes defeat:

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.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

This is hilarious, this morning when I checked Digg (it's a guilty pleasure of mine) there was two full pages of stories all of which were just thinly veiled postings of the number. I thought it had just been hacked somehow. Someone had at one point hidden it in Wikipedias article on Lenin.

I feel sorry for the owners of Digg though. It's a bit foolish to cave into the demands from the nerd swarm, afterall it's not going to be the nerd's doors who the MPAA lawyers will be knocking on. I don't have any problem with people posting that key on their own webspace and taking responsibility for the consequences, but throwing the worlds largest tantrum when Digg removes it from their webspace so they don't get sued is lame.

[Faram]

The digg maintainers where stupid, tghey should have ignored the HD-DVD number untill mpaa demanded a takedown. Then they could have removed it and posted somthing like "The evil MPAA censors the internet and DIGG" and come out smelling roses.

Instead the selfcensored a post and deleted some accounts and get a shitstorm.