Digg.com Attempts To Suppress HD-DVD Revolt 1142
fieryprophet writes "An astonishing number of stories related to HD-DVD encryption keys have gone missing in action from digg.com, in many cases along with the account of the diggers who submitted them. Diggers are in open revolt against the moderators and are retaliating in clever and inventive ways. At one point, the entire front page comprised only stories that in one way or another were related to the hex number. Digg users quickly pointed to the HD DVD sponsorship of Diggnation, the Digg podcast show. Search digg for HD-DVD song lyrics, coffee mugs, shirts, and more for a small taste of the rebellion." Search Google for a broader picture; at this writing, about 283,000 pages contain the number with hyphens, and just under 10,000 without hyphens. There's a song. Several domain names including variations of the number have been reserved. Update: 05/02 05:44 GMT by J : New blog post from Kevin Rose of Digg to its users: "We hear you."
Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, how timely (Score:5, Insightful)
"Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann
Indeed.
You can't ban a number. Period. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Was this duped on purpose? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot deserves a big thumbs-up from the tech community for NOT being one of those sites!
Digg meltdown (Score:5, Insightful)
Just my opinion, but I don't see how Digg can come out of this with any credibility left. Was this ever about the DMCA? Perhaps in the beginning, but it's turned into a battle of wills between the Digg admins and its user base, and, even if the admins could somehow manage to magically obliterate every article on this subject, they're going to have a hard time explaining themselves to the user base, who are, by and large, mad as hell.
And to those who are, indeed, mad as hell, consider what you will do after this incident is over. Kevin and the other admins may indeed fear a lawsuit if they don't take these articles down. Is that wrong, or is the law that allows this possibility the thing that is wrong? It's easy to sit there and paste line after line of numbers, but what would you do in the face of a lawsuit, even if it it's a ridiculous lawsuit supported by a law crafted just for this kind of abuse? You're taking action now, but will you get organized to push for real change tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that?
When will people realise... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Before this gets out of hand again... (Score:5, Insightful)
The MPAA (or whoever) is telling Digg to take down those stories.
They have the authority to do this thanks to the DMCA.
The DMCA is a law enacted by who? That's right, the government of the United States of America.
So who is threatening the people who run Digg with jail time? That's right, the United States of America.
How is that not censorship?
Re:Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
'"intellectual property" - The distorting and confusing term did not arise by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it... eject the narrow perspectives and simplistic picture the term "intellectual property" suggests. Consider each of these issues separately, in its fullness, and you have a chance of considering them well.' -- RMS
Screw digg! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, on a completely unrelated note, can anyone point me to that copy of book 3 of Scientology that was posted here a few years back?
kthnx.
Re:Credibility (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Credibility (Score:2, Insightful)
WRONG! (Score:4, Insightful)
Incorrect. Censorship is when someone censors [reference.com] you.
Censorship is a government telling someone what they cannot read, hear, see, or think.
Wrong. I can censor what my kids watch on TV, my work can censor my internet access, etc.
What you're thinking of is the first amendment.
Re:Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Screw digg! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, Slashdot also provided a detailed writeup on what had happened, why they were taking down the said comments (which happened to paste entire texts) and gave some pointers on finding the said information.
Which is completely different from Digg removing the story and not telling anyone about it (until of course the users discovered it). And their response was an after-the-fact event, made worse by the fact that Digg receives sponsorship for Diggnation from the very folks this thing seems to piss off.
The two are completely different, and Slashdot did it right. Digg did not do it right and the users are revolting. More power to them.
Take It To The Streets (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ah, how timely (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's the source code:
my @seeds = (
-1, 239, 7, -8, 0x93, 0x6a, 217, 81, 206, 55, 76, 187, 89, 76, 126, 182
);
# mutate the seed in some manner to get random hex output.
my @results;
foreach my $seed (@seeds)
{
my $result = ($seed + 10) % 256;
push @results, $result;
}
foreach my $result (@results) {
printf("%0x:", $result);
}
Re:Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
As though the number actually mattered anyhow. The only people who will use it don't need it posted.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about the number anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
While they can do what they want on their own site, it is more a matter of credibility than anything else right now. The whole revolt isn't even about the HD-DVD key. What has people feeling burnt is the fact that Digg purports to be about free and open user-driven content in a democratic setting, and what we're seeing here is a cabal of admins who are subverting the entire process of the system to suit their own whims.
Now as I said, it's not even about the 128-bit key anymore. And it's not about the DMCA or its merits(or lack thereof). The problem goes much deeper than that, and the encryption key debacle was more of a catalyst for what the more perceptive Diggers knew was going on all along but never really had any proof of. See, it's not just any posts containing the number they're removing. The Digg admins are removing and banning any discussion on the topic, even legitimate discussions on the ramifications of censorship in the user-driven internet era. Quite a few legitimate and thought-provoking discussions got clobbered when the admins got ban-happy today.
They have unwittingly set themselves up as a prime example of what can go wrong when marketing dollars(it is being reported that the HD-DVD guys throw ad dollars at Diggnation) meet the voice of the people. It is now being said that the Digg admins are stepping in and removing "objectionable" content when it conflicts with the will of their advertisers or displays any anti-Digg sentiment. While I'm sure this is good business sense, it's a very ugly way of being outed as a shill and a fraud to your readers. Digg is supposed to be the underdog who fought the status-quo and beat overwhelming odds against "the system". Now people are finding out that Digg has become the system, and they're a bit disillusioned that their hero Mr. Rose is just like any other business man who is out to make a buck. But like I said, the admins of Digg are obviously free to do with their site as they see fit. But Digg is only as good as the people who contribute to it. Kiss them good-bye and you kiss Digg good-bye.
Re:P.S. Digg This (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's the next wiki that's going to take over? Cowboynealpedia?
Re:Digg management are full of hypocrites (Score:5, Insightful)
The DMCA rule is (loosely paraphrased): if a site doesn't censor its users posts and implements an automatic takedown system with notification to the user, then it's safe from copyright infringement claims (safe harbor provision). By doing this, the copyright claimants must ask for each offending comment to be removed individually, and each time some comment is removed, the user who posted the comment receives a realtime notification and he can decide that he's not infringing anything and is allowed to put the post back up. After that, the post cannot be removed again, unless a court looks at the case and makes a ruling.
If however a site censors or modifies its users posts, then it is effectively taking editorial ownership and *that* is when the site becomes potentially liable for copyright infringement claims by third parties.
The Elephant In The Room (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Before this gets out of hand again... (Score:3, Insightful)
The DMCA isn't one way, it's two way. Some random guy can say your post is infringing his copyright, and you can say he's full of it. At that point, the web board is no longer involved. If the random guy wants to take it to court, he can only attack you directly (and conversely).
We've had stories about this before [slashdot.org].
Re:Was this duped on purpose? (Score:2, Insightful)
s/goal/touchdown/
Re:Honestly curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
What GP was referring to was this quote:
I think it's a valid question - are the HD-DVD group claiming that they own copyright on this number, or is the number somehow registered as a trade secret? Certainly I can understand how linking to a code listing of a program designed to circumvent copy protection is illegal in some jurisdictions (though I would still question whether it constitutes IP infringement), but posting the number? It's akin to me issuing takedown notices for sites containing the word 'boobies'*, because that's what I use as a password to protect my files against unauthorised copying.
* Not my real password.
This makes me laugh and angry at the same time (Score:5, Insightful)
A song, a t-shirt, a commercial, blog title, html color coding scheme, a bad poem, street directions, website name, and many others...
This is EXACTLY why monitoring private communications will never stop covert communications. This is exactly why the DRM won't work, why the relative Patriot Act efforts will fail and why monitoring doesn't work. The fact that the bad guys know there is monitoring will ensure that they use something so covert that all of us will see it and not know it, which is BTW very LOW tech, so won't be caught by hitech monitoring systems.
Whatever you think of Digg users, they have demonstrated an important thing. When someone needs to communicate, censorship will not work, the DMCA will fail to stop it, the Patriot Act cannot prevent the damage done and no new laws will fix this basic failure of preventative control.
Any message that wants to get out will get out, be it a key, a program, or just a rebellious thought. Censorship does not work.
Sure, there are those who pedantically will tell me it seems to be working in countries like China, but even there I think all they have done is slow down the information flow rather than cut it off. If writers in China want to post to blogs, they can get someone in Sweeden to write / host a dtmf translation program that takes a phone call, translates the DTMF and posts the information to the appropriate blog site/account. This would bypass all the censorship efforts to date.
The plus side of this is that along the way, someone somewhere is going to find innovative ways to do things. My bet is that it will always be those that want to be uncensored that innovate most.
Re:MAFIA: You lost. GET OVER IT. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow...just wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell ya what. I'll agree not to pass around that NUMBER if every company agrees never to pass around my NAME, particularly to junk mail vendors and telephone marketeers.
Why can't *you* see that it's exactly the same thing?
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's all refrain from over hyping this more than it needs to be...
Re:Credibility (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but like a ton of people in the IT industry, I work for a company that produces pretty much nothing but intellectual property. (Unless you count the t-shirts and logoed pens we give out at trade shows, that's all we do: intellectual property.) Those rock-bottom prices for digital stuff will put me out of a job, and probably a good proportion of Slashdot's userbase as well.
Given, the MPAA/RIAA have gone way overboard, but the other side is just as guilty. There has to be a common ground where everybody is happy and everybody with the genuine talent can make a living from it, but posting some stupid encryption key that the MPAA's already stopped using isn't really getting anybody any closer to that ideal.
Re:This isn't about the number anymore (Score:1, Insightful)
It does not make good business sense... It's very stupid idea to alienate your customers.
I'm stunned that the Digg admin response was roll in the tanks kill everything. Exactly what they did by deleting articles, comments and users...
Now they face a digital insurgency which may hobble them for a long time to come, if they do manage to recover from it.
You reap what you sow.
Re: Are you for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
I buy a DVD, I own the disk, the holes, the metal - the bits. The only bit I don't own is the actual art content.
To put it in the context of a book
I can choose to read the book backwards, skip every second letter - and even read the boring publication bits at the front - all legally.
So don't give me this crap that reading the bytes off a DVD I own is illegal.
Re:Credibility (Score:3, Insightful)
"People can get stuff without paying and now they don't want it to end."
Fallacy. Your cheap ass might ont want it to end, but most people don't mind paying what they think is fair fot a track.
iTnes has sold over 2.5 billion tracks. Most of which can be gotten for free with little effort.
However... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who will win? The MPAA or the users? Not digg (Score:3, Insightful)
First off Digg is a site for user content, but just as a note even a user content site can't allow just anything on their site. there's laws in the country and the best way to avoid crippling yourself is simple complying with them.
Essentially the fans in this case are killing digg because now the MPAA will either get pissed off and sue digg, or digg will get pissed off and close the site. Either way the only people the fans will hurt is digg, the site they frequent.
Btw the people telling Digg to stand up to the MPAA, shut the fuck up unless you got the money for their defense. Oh wait you arn't willing to pay millions for their legal fee? Digg is a site that's run for the fans, there's no huge cash pile of money hidden in the backroom. They arn't getting rich off Digg, they are just people who are creating a fan created news "blog" or link site. Asking them to stand up and fight for the right here is a joke as it will only cause them to close.
And don't think slashdot will stand up to the MPAA if it comes to it. I'd like to believe they would but I doubt it. I respect this site but I also understand the simple fact, the MPAA can bankrupt pretty much any site like this, and while we should fight against this, unless you have the money for the legal fund don't demand anyone fight it.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite. The issue is wrapped up in the temper tantrum the RIAA and MPAA have been throwing for several years now that their distribution model is getting messed up. They have always used strong-arm tactics to manufacture a monopoly in a genre that is replete with passion and creativity--I'm talking about art. Of course, the MPAA and the RIAA don't protect the artist, or protect the consumer. They protect the BUSINESS MODEL. Their argument that if people copy media, it makes it harder to get media, has collapsed in the past few years, and they've started randomly suing people.
In fact, look into how much music we would never get to hear but for the industrious hobbyists and fanatics keeping the original vinyls of their favorite music in pristine condition. There are tons of classic recordings that record labels are sitting on, and if I were any one of those dead artists, I would rise up from my grave and unleash my motherfucking zombie face on those cocksuckers. It's unfair.
So, to the conclusion. The encryption keeps people from making backups of their movies. HD-DVDs are not archival quality, I'm betting, and I WILL NOT replace my fucking media at a "reasonable price" (retail, according to the MPAA and RIAA). When you share information that has a fair use, and you get threatened with legal action by a corporate behemoth, sometimes people rise up and defend you. If reason, logic, pleading, conscience, legal action, and appealing to their better nature have failed, why not try the million flies in the ointment method?
Oh, but if you copy an album, the artist doesn't get his 80 cents.
PS: It still fucks me off that the RIAA is trying to claim ownership of the fucking royalties to my music. Really.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is better than digg post-popularity. The only two clear incidents of censorship on slashdot that I remember - the scientology posts that were deleted, and the thread about story moderation - are both quite exceptional; the scientology censorship was done with as much publicity and openeness as could be expected, and the story-moderation censorship was (presumably) done by a now-disbanded and dishonoured editor (Michael Sims, 'Nazi Editor').
The point being: Slashdot has retained much or all of its independence; it survived the surge of popularity only to be bought up by a - as far as I can tell - benign corporate overlord, losing none of its independence and none of its verve (as much as the latter may seem to be lacking).
Digg, meanwhile, seems to be a short-lived exercise in user-defined content that has devolved into a juvenile comment squad and an editorship that is apparently willing to practice censorship for the basest of reasons.
Re:Before this gets out of hand again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
That's wrong. when the first key appeared they could have simply let it stand. Then if/when the CCA comes with a C&D, they do what other websites in such trouble before them have done: they take the offending postings down, notify the users who wrote the postings directly. And most importantly put a big article on the frontpage "The evil MPAA censored us!". They look out as persecuted heroes to their community while complying with the law.
This is not rocket science: slashdot did it, google did it. Lots of well publicized cases for this approach. No court case, no lawyer fees.
Instead, to salvage their business relationship with the HDDVD consortium, they did the worst possible thing and silently deleted the posting and even the user!
Only THEN the backlash started with tons of submissions with the forbidden number to point out digg's shameful behaviour in dealing with the problem.
Re:Credibility (Score:3, Insightful)
This might be the only time in my memory when I found thousands of chaos-loving 12 year-olds doing something actually useful for the future of the humanity.
But fear not, this whole nonsensical scam of "Intellectual Property" will, as it must, get more idiotic and common-sense defying as time goes on and to defeat the resulting disobedience and ridicule amongst the technical users the corporate politicos will attempt to implement increasingly more depraved, totalitarian police tactics. There is simply no other way for this to proceed since, ultimately, "Intellectual Property" is all about ownership of thoughts, and as such impossible without Thought Police in one form or another, made only scarier and more vicious as technologies advance closer to direct man-machine interfaces.
This HD-DVD fiasco is a perfect example of the monumental stupidity of the very phillosophical foundations of "Intellectual Property" in all of their imbecillic glory: an infinite number of integer numbers can be transformed, via an infinite number of mathematical funtions, into the number in question. Effectively to "censor" that target number one has to censor the entire science of Mathematics as one can simply post one in that infinite set of numbers and a corresponding transformation function (as many have done using simplistic schemes such as ROT13 etc).
And this just to illustrate one of the many abysmally fatal flaws of the greedmongering system called by its con-artist fathers "The Intellectual Property".
Re:Beyond the hex (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it. While there are certainly times that people take advantage of anonymity to seem brave, I don't think this is one of those times. I think more relevant is the fact that the group of people who are knowledgeable about this are diffuse, and the internet is the place they can meet and converse.
> "If anything, online petitions
I think there's been ample evidence in the past decade that people protesting in the street does little to sway a determined government too. I don't think that means we should just roll over and accept it.
Being afraid to speak openly because of fear of reprisals does not make one a coward.
Re:Screw digg! (Score:2, Insightful)
Would you call it censorship if someone posted your social security number, phone number, bank account numbers, etc, over and over and over, and Digg admins took it down?
That isn't speech. It isn't protected. The kids are just behaving badly. They are mad because they want it their way. What they are doing is selfish, and not at all helpful to fighting real censorship. They are a mob. A distration from real issues. A mindless crowd, copycatting each other.
The crowd is untruth. (S.K.)
Come on... Karma, go get 'em.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, you can also argue that a DVD contains one really, really long number, and thus should not be copyrightable. I tell those people that they're full of shit and move on.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why strong IP law is so attractive: (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I'm no fan of the DMCA, because I think it causes more damage and economic loss, here in the U.S., than it can or will ever possibly create in new IP-export revenue. But the logic driving it, when you separate it from the implementation, isn't that hard to understand, at least from a certain point of view. Allow me to illustrate how I think many people see the problem:
When we set aside irrational feelings of American exceptionalism -- those warm feelings that politicians always play to, when they talk about the "American worker" being the "best in the world" as if it was self-evident -- it is not immediately clear exactly how our previous success over the past century [1], necessarily translates into continued success in the future. In short, although everyone likes to say reassuring things like "Americans have always been at the forefront of innovation!", those words ring pretty hollow -- it's not clear why we would continue to be. We're not smarter than everyone else, our education system basically sucks, and we have a culture that's increasingly anti-intellectual and in some cases bordering on non-secular.
What this boils down to is: in a fully globalized economy, it's not clear what areas the U.S. will have a comparative advantage in. We'll probably always be able to export some agricultural products, but agricultural products do not a first-world civilization pay for. Same with natural resources like coal and timber but we'll need them here eventually, so we'd just be selling ourselves down the river. So what do you have left, when you've outsourced everything that can be outsourced to lower-cost second- and third-world areas? I think Neal Stephenson was onto something: music, movies, microcode, and pizza delivery.
'Pizza delivery' is the remaining service-sector crap that can't be outsourced. Music and movies are 'cultural exports,' things that for whatever reason, have a certain cachet in the rest of the world, and so don't really fall victim to direct price competition with foreign competitors. And microcode [1A] -- even if we're not the best at that, either, we'll use our monopoly to milk the rest of the world pretty good for as long as we can. But we can only do that if we can get them to buy into the legal framework which lets you sell IP as if it were physical goods. Hence, the DMCA and other 'strong IP' laws.
All of this is just my rather long-winded way of trying to explain why so many people (people in government in particular) are hooked on strong IP law (including the DMCA, DRM, and anti-circumvention), and proprietary software: they see it as a way to ensure that the U.S. can still make money doing the only thing that we seem to be good at. It may not seem at first glance to make a whole lot of sense, particularly to non-Americans, but I've met a lot of fairly powerful people who are very, very nervous about where the New/Global Economy is headed, and how the U.S. is going to maintain its standard of living [2] in the future. If you're looking for a near-magic solution, which you are if you're a politician, grabbing onto intellectual property as the salvation of high-cost Western society probably isn't the stupidest thing you'll do all day.
[1] Much of which is attributable to having had the good luck not to get involved in any home-turf land wars (like Europe, which got flattened, some of it twice) and getting on board the capitalism bus early (unlike Asia, which is just coming around to this whole market-economy business).
[1A] I'm using "microcode" here to represent basically all IP-derived exports, which includes most pharmaceuti
Re:Credibility (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this is just a number. Only a number. To use something to circumvent copy controls it has to have functions or methods associated with it (e.g. be executable computer code). This shouldn't qualify.
Re:Credibility (Score:4, Insightful)
too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."
At this point it looks like look much like a PR move. In an attempt to make themselves look good, they're acting like they're decided to take a stand against The Man, when in fact they're just bowing to pressure. Besides the fact that they just literally couldn't continue enforcing the censorship without turning off the site, they seem to ignore the fact that they didn't just remove articles containing the hex code, but articles containing the story of their censorship!
Slashdot isn't making a big deal out of their lack of censorship, and they aren't issuing a war cry- but I can write F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 without having to worry about my account being deleted, and that means more to me than some half-assed excuse.
Digg is attempting to shift the blame and rally a cause away from it, when it should be admitting that they all made a mistake and apologizing. Now its too late for them to gain the respect of their user base without a lot of long, hard work (if even that will be enough).
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, calling it a DDOS is disingenuous at best. Digg's entire concept is centered around user-posted content. The problem they have now is that their users are at odds with thier corporate overlords, and they picked thier side. It's not a DDOS. At worst, it's teenage "information wants to be free" mob-wankery. Digg invited this conflict with thier business model. Hardly an "innocent bystander."
Just about the only thing you got right is that they are accomplishing nothing, but the rest of your mealy-mouthed double-speak is pure bullshit.
Re:Five thousand 12-year-olds throw a temper tantr (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel bad for Kevin - I don't believe that anyone legitimately upset by this whole situation wants Digg to die. Unfortunately the moderators made a number of bad decisions that only made things worse. Perhaps they should've allowed one story on the topic and had everyone comment there. Keep that page up until they have a legitimate, hand delivered paper DMCA takedown request. Then users' anger would be focused where it really belongs (read MPAA).
With the moderators banning accounts and deleting posts, they took entirely the wrong approach, and are now suffering the consequences. Sadly, this may be a very, very hard lesson for Kevin / Digg.
When you create a social networking/commenting site, knowingly or not, you put yourself at the mercy of a large number of people who can be extremely volatile. Not a whole lot of difference between that and a good, old-fashioned mob of real people.
Here's hoping some good can come out of this whole unfortunate situation...
N.
Re:Digg is offline (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:too little too late (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fark's response... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, in this case, the breakdown is more like: 1) the "Intellectual Property" laws are certifiably and demonstrably insane, 2) greedmongering abusers of the said laws demand that digg becomes their henchman-by-proxy, 3) digg complies, 4) users revolt, 5) now digg capitulates and suddenly is about to fight its would be master.
So digg was not an "innocent, law abiding bystander" anymore then some guards at Abu Ghraib were "just following lawful orders" (an extreme case of the same principle). Furthermore the "attackers" managed to beat digg into growing a pair and fighting against some of the "intellectual property" scam, thus standing up for what its owners were posturing to be all about, ergo the "twit attackers" accomplished quite a bit, it would seem to me.
Re:Digg Management Has Officially Forfeited (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Credibility (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the pot thing, maybe it's because I lot of people like to smoke pot? (I do.) Consider yourself in the boring, prudish minority on this one, bro. "Do dope and cook your brain" sounds like something my grandfather would say. Not the one who's still alive. The one who died 20 years ago. When he was 90. What is your hangup? It's not as if the smoke is coming through the monitor screen or something.
Regarding Kevin Rose's response (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest, I'd say he's missed the point. The primary reason that his readers aren't unhappy isn't because of his team's moderating of the HD DVD code; at least, not directly. They're unhappy because the stories were taken down without explanation, users were apparently banned for simply doing what one is supposed to do on the site, and generally gave the impression that he had sided with them over us, which is never going to go down well.
If he'd just been more up-front and honest about what was going on, things would have gone much more smoothly. Sure, there would have been grumbling and a few irrepressible rebels would have posted the stuff anyway, but I seriously doubt that the reader base would have caught fire like it did. The biggest issue, IMO, was that it gave the impression (if not the reality) of a breach of trust, and trust is possibly the key thing to have in any sort of community.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know (personally) an engineer who did. Although we are speaking of DVDs rather then HD-DVDs (and quite compressed rips at that). It contains a pile of Disney and other kids stuff. The thing came about when he got annoyed at the horrid mess his kids managed to create with their DVDs (including scratching the mirror side) and also inspired by the observation that they seem to enjoy the same movie over and over and over and ... you get the idea. Hence the MythTV box with a remote. Kids are ecstatic and he has no more trouble with their lost/damaged disks.
Re:too little too late (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hypocritical stances do piss me off.
The problem is that digg tried to be a business based on certain ethos. You can't have it both ways, to project "radical", "anti-estabilishment" etc image to create your business and then fold like a cheap suit as soon as your revenue is threatened by one of the very members of the "estabilishment" and then expect that your audience wont notice.
So this pathetic "But we only tried to make moneeeeey! Waaah! We said all those things to make money! We meant none of it! Mommy! They are trying to take away my moneeeey! Waaah!" excuse is likely to achieve the flight properties of a ton of bricks with their audience.
Re:I'd like to say...(is pure flamebait) (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't like gay PDA? Well, imagine how some gays feel about hetero PDA. (I'm straight, for the record). Don't like Pro-420 articles? Well, simple fact is pot never killed anyone - you pass out before you can overdose. But every years thousands of people die from ingesting perfectly legal liquor. Don't like people tweaking the corporate plutocracy by posting crypto keys? Well, then just roll over and let the corporations tel you what to think. Lord knows it's easier than doing it yourself. You're a Troll. A Class A Troll, and I am appalled that you've been modded so well. And when you get your knickers all bunched up, please think twice before posting like that - although, once would be a grand improvement.
RS
Re:Credibility (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I think your comment below is wrong too:
They shouldn't be allowed to design a lock that can be opened with any pointed object and then ban all sticks and branches.
This is not like designing a lock that can be opened with any pointed object and banning all sticks and branches and more like designing a lock that can be opened with only specially formed pointed objects and then trying to ban people from publically sharing the designs for the pointed objects that open the lock. Not just any sequence of numbers will decrypt the protection, only very specific ones.
The reality of the situation (Score:1, Insightful)
Whether there is a copy write infringement or not is immaterial. No one in their right mind would go up against a large corporation like the RIAA etc. Despite what many people might think the legal system is not about who is right and who is wrong, its about who has the most money. Even if Digg fought a good fight they would run out of money before the RIAA etc came close to spending their petty change. Digg would cease to exist from then on.
If Digg (Kevin Rose) had communicated to the Digg user base in a manner that let diggers feel that they were part of the decision and understood the reasons (2 paragraphs of crap doesn't count http://blog.digg.com/?p=73 [digg.com]) then there would be no problem.
To the Digg team - get a communications specialist on your team or this is going to happen again and if there is a next time and Digg doesn't die you might just save yourself the embarrassment.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
2^6 x 5 x 19 x 12,043 x 216,493 x 836,256,503,069,278,983,442,067 = x
Solve for X and express in big-endian hexidecimal.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
If everyone simply folds, MPAA/RIAA are indeed guaranteed to win. A large number of high profile cases highlighting the more illogical parts of the "law" is the only way to get the politicos to start weighing RIAA bribes vs public outrage.
They painted themselves in a corner. This is the result of their efforts at setting certain expectations of their behaviour. Now they can either fold and keep what they earned, but with the penalty of wide defections and disdain of their former audience (possibly destroying digg) or to fight, possibly losing and thus possibly destroying digg. A quandry of their own making.
In other words you would like those who made the site's success possible to the point that a larger audience became involved to go away after it became apparent that they have been callously used, right?
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:1, Insightful)
In short, take some of these obnoxious laws off the books and allow these people to shut up and live their lives quietly. But so long as the government maintains the arcane notion that perfectly reasonable acts (homosexuality and drug use) are wrong/illegal, people who believe this have the right (and some might argue, obligation) to speak out in support of their beliefs.
If you don't like it, perhaps you should shut up and live your life quietly. Digg is frequented by tech folks who tend to lean towards libertarianism and drugs and gay rights are part of that philosophy...deal with it.
Way to fly your company into a hillside, dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing these arrogant upstarts forget is when you create something and the public use it, the public own it. Sure legally you have 'title', but if you try and mess with it the public will be at your throat. They've invested their time and effort in building up your business, and they're now a part of it too. MMPOGs like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies have discovered it the hard way, to the point Raph Koster warns upstarts once others use it, you cease to own it. But the message still hasn't got out.
The smartest thing Kevin could have done is admitted a mistake and canceled the HD DVD Digg sponsorship to avoid conflict of interested. The smartest thing the board could do now is fire Kevin, before their investors see their hard earned cash peed up against the wall. The longer Kevin hisses and spits at his users, the more damage it does Digg. Digg dugg their own grave.
(pause) feel the power, boys!
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:2, Insightful)
*women*
But please, I'll do the talking.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Their only "obligation" is, and always was, to click on the ads on digg (thus generating vast majority of digg's revenue) and participate in the digg discussions. That's it. They are the audience to whom digg owners were posturing in order to attract a following, not the money-making owners themselves.
By this token you should give up a notion of expecting to recieve goods for your money in a store, or such trifles as a salary for your labours.
Pretty much. If they were led to believe that the site represents certain ethos, only to be disappointed, they will do what they can: i.e. express their anger and leave, thus depriving digg of much of its revenue.
Non sequitur alert. The fact that the user's only "sacrificed" a click or a view does not in any way reduce the monetary value of the ads to their marketers.
A lot of people are apparently "delusional" when told to expect that they will get rewarded in some way for some actions, small or large, by those who made such promises, explicitely or otherwise. I am led to believe that most of commerce world-wide is based on participation of such "delusional suckers".
Re:Why strong IP law is so attractive: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's not terribly convincing. People who dislike protectionism 'religiously,' as many people do, really aren't helping anything -- they just make the free-trade argument look irrational (which in my book, is a pretty grave insult).
There are some fairly good arguments against protectionism on purely economic grounds, because it's allegedly self-defeating in the long run, and they fail anyway. E.g., it's not worth prohibiting outsourcing, because in the near-term, it's impossible to enforce, and in the long term, it just drives businesses away or leads to domestic ones being overrun by foreign competition; the further you fight this process the worse it ends up hurting you in the end.
Economic arguments like this are really the only valid basis for opposing protectionist policies -- just taking on faith that "protectionism is bad" and "free trade is good" is not going to satisfy people when the economy starts slowing down and they're looking for scapegoats. We're already starting to see this, and it's probably going to get worse.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer nerds grow up to become corporate shills. Would you rather spend years at an unknown startup or game company, slaving away 24-7 on a product which may not succeed, or would you like an 8+ hour flexible time job with a nice $80K paycheck + benefits? If you had the latter, you might take a little pride in the company paying you, and you might know something that is being misconstrued and want to correct the
I have friends at places including Adobe, Apple, Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc. They all read
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
I also sync from the storage in the roof to my iPod for the car instead of managing a separate set of playlists for that.
Why should ANY of what I am doing here be illegal ?
Re:Digg Management Has Officially Forfeited (Score:2, Insightful)
Deleting posts, deleting users because you "fear" a lawsuit, and even worse so: doing it without proper explanation? That is not a simple, seemingly unimportant, decision. That is just plain stupid.
If you decide you don't want this key posted, say so. Don't go sneaking behind people's backs and shooting them unexpectingly. That's something Stalin did (phew, just narrowly escaped Godwin there).
And why, of all the websites out there, do they want to be holier than the pope? I don't get it. This is not something you do in the spur of the moment. You never decide to kill posts and users in the spur of the moment. There always is some incentive behind that.
Digg admins messed up. Big time.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
There certainly are a bunch of problems with the way the community is being run (and I say that as someone who is an admin on en.wp and has been for a couple of years already), but the fact remains that Wikipedia's goal is to write an encyclopaedia - and NOTHING else.
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, some of us still appear to be banned from moderation, presumably because of that thread. I don't remember modding it, and I don't remember commenting on it (although I may have), but I certainly read it.
I've not been able to moderate since. It was a good couple of years before I could even meta-mod; going to metamod.pl directly (I didn't get the link on the front page) gave me a curt "you're not allowed to do this" message.
It may just be a coincidence, but with a 5-digit UID account that hit the karma cap back when karma was a number rather than a textual description and stayed there I can't see what other crime I could have committed.
(And no, I've never bothered to ask; to be honest, I don't really care. I just thought I'd point out that while the editor responsible may well have been let go, the fallout still exists)
Copyrighting other numbers (Score:1, Insightful)
(There's a serious point in here someone, I just can't remember where I put it...)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
On the Digg site there was armchair geeks who couldn't find the format command in DOS commenting about it, t'was moronic.
Digg may be entertaining and 'power to the people' but all it takes is a decent sized group of 'people' and next thing you know you have 911 'truthers' with front page articles.
Sure they get buried, but then they just submit another one. It's like whack a mole, and there is no real content on Digg.
What really drives me nuts is the 'make me famous' posts where someone posts a blog entry with 15 words about something huge, and they all go to this blog site first before watching some dumb youtube clip.
It's a waste of space, but it attracts the yahoos leaving the more intelligent sites alone.
Re:Digg meltdown (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's unfortunate. It is and has been an atmosphere where you get accused of being what you are not, I think it's sad that replies resort to that rather than actually respond properly to a statement.
I've found that I can't breathe a word against Linux without some sort of venom spat at me, and the same went for saying anything against Apple as a corporation. At times, the same goes with saying Microsoft actually does something right on occasion, in my opinion.
It's not a good argument, I think it's more an argument based on a tech religion, ideology or insecurity than anything resembling a good argument.
Re:Digg decides to stand up to the MPAA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not government disinformation, but she should learn some basic statistics if she's trying to imply anything by this observation. That some mentally ill people take drugs doesn't in itself tell us what effect taking drugs has on mental health.
I imagine alcohol is involved in a large amount of accidents needing hospital treatment, but this doesn't mean people who drink will end up in A&E, or that we should criminalise it.
Re:Five thousand 12-year-olds throw a temper tantr (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, give me a break! The guy is trying to make himself out as some kind of hero just because his customers revolted and forced him to reverse himself on a decision he never should have made in the first place. His "We'd rather go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company" bullshit is about as sincere as Michael Richards' day-after-I-got-into-trouble dedication to racial justice.
Re:Digg decides to stand up to the MPAA! (Score:5, Insightful)
What if it were a CC #? (Score:1, Insightful)
What if the numbers in question was someone's credit card number?
I don't see much of a difference.
It's like screaming about free speech in a private chat room. Whoever owns/runs the chat room can do whatever the f*** they want, including censoring.
Re:P.S. Digg This (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevermind that this should have been the case all along, and the fact that it wasn't is deeply disturbing.
Yet another reason to avoid the sewer that is Digg.
Gotta side with Kevin (Score:1, Insightful)
It all came to a head for me when a story hit the front page of Digg about the Insurrection Act and the expansion of the conditions when the President can declare martial law to basically whenever he wanted. Somebody spammed the number in that story, and another person made a very apt comment to the effect, "If only people put this much effort into fighting something that matters, like this martial law crap, we might actually be able to change things."
So, try putting all this energy into something that actually matters instead of spamming a stupid number.
Re:Digg decides to stand up to the MPAA! (Score:5, Insightful)
When /. pulled the Scientology comment, they owned up to it like men. Kevin Rose tried to hide it like a bitch. Then, we he got called on it, suddenly he's posturing like he's John Wayne or something.
Re:P.S. Digg This (Score:3, Insightful)
The law doesn't matter in that case - it just means he can't get sued. His sponsors can still pull their funding[...]
Unfortunately, nothing means you can't get sued. As one of my lawyers is fond of saying, "They can sue you for anything." The law decides whether or not you win, but there can be an awful lot of pain and expense between getting sued and winning.
Re:P.S. Digg This (Score:3, Insightful)
And the summary has to say "Title says it All"
Re:Wikipedia is blocking this number also, (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the main issue is that the number you are referring to here is not really a legitimate article name, and that a proper encyclopedia article about this topic can be done in a number of ways that doesn't necessarily use this number as the name of the article. Still, I don't see why it is a big deal to use the number in a redirect.
This number is not being "censored" in the same way the Digg was doing it, and it certainly is not controvercial on Wikipedia at the moment, other than perhaps a couple of over-zealous admins. I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill here in your attempt to attack Wikipedia.
Make a real article about this topic, and don't just complain about censorship when you can't write English worth a damn. If you think you can string two or more words together in a coherent fashion, and can dig up some legitimate sources for what the whole controversy is about (the
Re:I'd like to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Proving it would be next-to-impossible unless you know the poster personally.
However, it's well known that sites like digg and reddit have third-party companies offering to get your story onto the front page for a cost. It's not really a huge leap to think that some of these marketing groups are also running shrill accounts. And there have been many online memes that turned out to be artificial campaigns. Examples include Ashley Simpson, LonelyGirl (great name, superb marketing) and various other incidents [thenewpr.com]. Washington DC has been caught out before and here in this weeks Scottish elections there was newspaper that caught the candidates faking responses to an online poll.
So, to make the assumption that the most internet-aware industry (I.T.) isn't doing this is downright naive.
Re:I'd like to say...(is pure flamebait) (Score:3, Insightful)
What really bugs me goes beyond PDA though, it's when you get to have a parade, with people wearing nothing but chains, with a giant phallic balloon that squirts. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be acceptable for straight people, so why is it for straight people.
Around here, the local Gay & Lesbian society of the city of Kelowna petitioned to have funding for a parade. The answer they got back was fairly reasonable and straightforward: such an event would only promote the interests of a minority, and thus should be privately funded and not use taxpayer dollars. They weren't denied the right to the parade, just to fund it from public purse-strings. However, it went to litigation, and from my understanding the city was basically forced to fund the event.
This happens a lot with minority groups or events, because many of these groups have a vocal element which tends to have a persecution complex. I've seen it on slashdot, for example here [slashdot.org] where a slashdotter indicates that victims of orientation-based bullying should get a special precedence.
Again, this is just the current example, there are plenty of other situations. One of my best friends has a cousin who complained loudly of discrimination. He claimed that he had problems finding work and was looked down on because he was Native (which, locally, is somewhat the equivalent at times to being a person of colour in the US). As my friend pointed out to him: "dude, you look as white as me, and the only reason anyone knows you're native is because you bring it up all the time. And people don't like you because you start fights and steal cars"
The point is that the grandparent it right, to an extent. Many people don't have a problem with group X. They do end up having a problem when group X pushes their own agenda into everyone else's face, or when it colours your point of view on every issue. I have friends who are native. Some aspects of their lives are coloured by their culture, and I can respect that. I have friends/relatives that are gay, and again I have respect for how it affects their lifestyles in both positive and negative ways. I don't mind at all being involved the activities of said groups, but I would if they started pushing it upon me. The problem is when the person becomes the category, and assume they must live their lives thus.
I think it's much better to - if you have the opportunity - live life in a sane and normal manner. This means that you don't need to shout from the rooftops, unless a major issue is at hand. It also means that you can reasonably advocate your position. Some people have to spend every minute shoving their lifestyle in everyone else's face, when we are just trying to live our own, which in the end lessens your cause rather than furthers it. So by keeping things down at the level of "advocate" or "spokesperson" rather than "zealot", perhaps everyone can show a bit more tolerance.
Oh, and for the record, there are cases when an uprising is warranted. Rodney King, being fired based on orientation, and many others, but these are specific times and events.
Agreed. (Score:3, Insightful)
By all means feel free to distribute; consider it under the GFDL if you'd like to edit it.
One of the problems I see with the American future is that two of those products -- music and movies -- are to a large extent dependent on the health of the country in general. If/when things start to turn really sour and we don't have as much money as a country, we're not the glamour spot of the world, then our culture will no longer be a defining one and our movies and music will be relevant only to us. I think the long-term viability of entertainment is based on the long-term viability of the culture. So that reduces us to exporting natural resources -- of which we still have lots -- or reacquiring manufacturing capabilities once our economy has slowed to the point where we can do that at the same price as third-world nations.
I agree; and in fact this is one of the reasons why I think the position I outlined above is a bit shortsighted. Hollywood and the music industry are only able to export cultural products because 'Americana' in general carries a certain cachet in most of the world; if the perception of America as a nice/free/rich place slips, then over time, the popularity and marketability of those cultural exports will slip as well. (I think this is one of the reasons why the Bush administration is very unpopular among the Hollywood set -- they're dependent in large part on our image in the international arena in order to export their products.) And 'microcode' (which includes not only software but also pharmaceutical research and other IP) is dependent either on really being the best in the field -- which is tough, because our educational system is terrible at the hard sciences -- or on various forms of vendor lock-in, which are probably not stable in the long run.
However, the solutions to these problems are very, very hard, and they involve really taking a look in the mirror that most Americans -- and certainly most politicans -- would rather not do. Nobody wants to do it, both because it's fundamentally depressing: for starters, you have to throw away all the irrational exceptionalist garbage that says we'll somehow magically succeed no matter what, because we're just that damn cool (or blessed by God, or whatever), and beyond that, there are a whole lot of industries that just can't be reasonably expected to continue in a fully globalized market, and are going to disappear. Nobody wants to tell a large section of the workforce "I'm sorry, but you just really cost way too much for what you do, and nobody's going to pay you to do it anymore."
And even if you get past that, then you run into the hard issues about why we're failing to remain competitive; and IMO there are some serious cultural issues at work that need to be changed. A large part of America is borderline non-secular and strongly anti-intellectualist -- this is pretty deeply ingrained in our culture (and has not, historically, been a bad thing), but is probably not helpful if you're trying to find ways of leapfrogging the Chinese and Indians and remaining on the forefront of technological development purely on merit.
I don't have any cute solutions or dogma to push; I don't think there's any easy way out or any free lunch. But I think that in order to reasonably oppose laws and stances that seem to be bad or counterproductive (the DMCA, etc.) it helps to first understand the underlying feelings that cause people to support it.
Re:Why strong IP law is so attractive: (Score:2, Insightful)
It is common on Slashdot, in part because of the outsourcing of coding and coding-related jobs to India, to equate "cheaper manufacturing/production" with inevitable disappearance from our shores.
If that were in fact true, then why haven't manufacturing jobs moved to Senegal, Ghana, Bangladesh or Haiti? Those places would clearly be cheaper. In actual fact, the US is still the cheapest when you consider what actually matters: productivity. How else could one explain falling manufacturing employment with increased real output globally? You recognize that the productivity of coders in India may be lower than that of an equivalent engineer in the US. However, the price differential means that paying for a less productive "employee" in India may be worth it.
If you look at the US manufacturing sector, we have the highest productivity per worker in the world. In fact, it's easily the highest. Why do we still have steel mills? Why do we manufacture "Japanese" cars in the US? It is because US workers - and manufacturing workers are included - are generally the most efficient, productive workers in the world. Those that aren't lose their jobs to India, China, etc. Those that are keep attracting foreign investment. It's not an accident that The Economist calls the US the "world's manufacturer."
Regarding fears of China "overtaking us" I have this to say: The US economy will remain the strongest and most dominant economy for some time - perhaps even for most or all of our lifetimes. Eventually China, by sheer dint of population, may outstrip us, but they're going to have many, many significant, huge, social problems before then. If China ever copies the fine pre-handover Hong Kong example which the British left the world, then move over U.S., because we're going to get trounced. In the meantime, China will simply remain a cheap place to manufacture lower-technology goods. I include computers and HDTVs in the "lower-technology goods" category. We shouldn't be trying to compete with China in those areas anyhow - it's a waste of our workers, who are the world's most efficient.
> I think the answer is staring you in the face: as a nation, the U.S. imports a
> lot of physical goods, but exports a lot of intellectual property.
This is true, but it just proves our versatility as a nation and is only looking at half of the story (and not even in the "glass half-empty" kind of way). Look at China or Japan or Thailand or India: they export strongly in only a few areas and have historically not demonstrated the capacity to develop world-leading or world-beating companies in others. Compare Bollywood to Hollywood: They make far more movies in India than Hollywood does - but no one's running around in the streets screaming that they're about to take over the world's movie industry. The whole idea is ridiculous, and in case you think it's a bad example, I suggest you think more closely about the metaphor.
> Therefore, we reward companies who chisel their foreign suppliers into squeezing
> their employees, because this results in cheap imports here in the States. Likewise,
> we punish IP 'theft,' because IP is one of the last things that we seem to be able
> to produce and sell.
That's just plain empirically false. Nike's not going to make sneakers in some plant in Oregon if they can get Malaysians to do the same job for $16 per day. They can afford to pay for ineffecient workers if they're comparatively cheap. We happen to produce and sell more