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The end of Digg is nigh?
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 2nd May 2007
As Digg refuses to give in to pressure over the leaked HD DVD code, could the end be in sight?
For those not in the Digg loop, I'll elaborate. Not long ago a news story got pushed up on Digg.com that detailed how the HD DVD decryption keys had been found out. A take down order was issued by those affected and the link was removed. That, normally would have been the end of it.
Not for Digg though.
Instead, Digg users united and began flooding the site with the reposted link, garlanding their efforts with Digg upon Digg. CEO, Jay Adelson, tried to respond to it all via a blog post, stating that; "Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law", but it did little to stem the tide.
Faced with having to take drastic measures to salvage the situation Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, released another blog post regarding the situation. In the end he came out and gave the following announcement:
"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."
It's beautiful to watch true democracy in action, even if the following lawsuits might spell the end of Digg.com.
Reckon the Digg community has doomed itself, or think the HD DVD guys were all bluff anyway? Let us know in the forums, after you Digg the story of course.
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Comments (37)Stats: 0.658 seconds
Tbh, it was stupid for encryption to be this easy
Not that it matters anyways - the encryption has been cracked for months.
TBH I won't be that saddened if Digg falls over this, thought I doubt they will. It's an interesting place to grab some news, but the community is worthlessly childish and immensely hypocritical (although admittedly their hypocrisy is in self-censorship, and the posts aren't deleted). They'll spend all day complaining about the religious mindset of the government and how it's destroying the country, when their own hive-mind would have someone who likes Vista hung.
Which is why I never bother even trying to participate in discussions any more. At least some of the slashdot mods are honest enough to mod up a post they disagree with if it genuinely contributes to the discussion. Half the content is blogspam anyways, and two thirds of what isn't ends up crashing shortly after hitting the front page.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZ_OCPG2fg
it is even in youtube........
wikipedia + Streisand effect = some great knowledge :D
And yet ironically, no one would want to buy Digg *because* of things like this :D Would you want to buy into that user-base? :)
god damn.... it even has it own music now!!!!!.
I think Digg is really just caught in the crossfire of a bigger and long standing fight between the people and media control industry.
Actually, you got it the wrong way round. DRM got caught in the crossfire of an issue primarily centred on Digg. Digg users have suspected overly tight moderation on certain topics for a while and it's just this DRM issue which has brought it boiling to the surface. It was a crazy idea to even try to censor this series of numbers in the first place (and that's what the original Digg story about the cease and disist notice was about) so when Digg actually acceded to the take down notice itself, Digg users felt betrayed.
That's what the whole issue is about, people are not submitting stories containing the key again and again because they hate DRM, they are doing it because they feel the demonstration of the value of their democratic network will help change the way Digg is moderated in the future. And it looks like they succeeded.
It's not democracy in action, it's mob rule, burn the (douchebag) heretics. :(
this reaction is only going to hurt digg. now if you flooded a an MPAA site or something like that then it would make sense. but its just going to result in the loss of digg.
In short: You can unlock the encryption on all currently released HD-DVDs so that you can copy/rip them, or watch them on a non HDCP-compliant system like Linux.
the box has been opened and no amount of laywering will make it close again (ref pandora's box)
on another note, I'm sticking with bit for my tech news, and these forums for discussion. the mods here are honest, and the conversations intelligent (even the fanboys here argue with some sense) and the articles are well thought out and fair.
http://xkcd.com/c202.html
http://xkcd.com/c185.html
#202 can be just as easily applied to digg
The only reason Digg is so popular is because it allows people to say what's good/bad and not marketers.
Whether that's the opinion of fanboys or not is inconsequential tbh as its still someone's opinion rather than some marketers being paid to try to fool you into thinking something is good when its not...
Digg got its power from the people, its seems only just that it may be killed by them too.
However, its too late to stop this sort of social bookmarking and the collective conscience of the people should soon be powerful enough to really sort out the RIAA, MPAA and any other idiotic, money-grabbing power-whores.
For some reason, Rage Against the Machine lyrics just popped into my head.
I've never been a Digg reader (is that "Digger"?) just as I never followed Slashdot. Regardless, this whole issue seems amazingly stupid to me. Digg has a right to protect itself from legal action, whereas its users do not have a divine right to post whatever they wish to.
The only problem I see is the censorship of the posts about the removal of content, which certainly seems wrong to me. The rest of it gimme a break.
Kev is an genius idiot: he should not allow the key to be on the site, but allow linking to it. That way he has the google defence.
And their site isn't worth dick without its users.
About as much use as a forum with no members.
Digg can easily stop users spamming anything onto the site but then again, the people are the only ones who make it what it is.
If they start ailenating their user-base, they have no userbase.
Digg is merely the stage, its users are the performers...
Having deposed the dictators and laid waste their infrastructure, what do all the people you've helped get to eat and drink? Where are the re-construction plans? Real life should have taught the 'collective conscience' some lessons.
[/Johnnie Cochran] :)
But I think they were being responsible.
The only reason all this content is encoded/region locked/encrypted etc is to screw consumers out of more money.
Geeks in the know feel a responsibility to protect the unwitting masses from the greedy corporations and hence why they felt so strongly about reposting this code.
Sure, some of them are assholes, some responsible and some not.
Some were probably sheep, some were probably doing it for the reasons I state above.
In the end though, the collective conscience of the Diggers spoke and sent a message loud and clear to the MPAA/RIAA as well as the Digg founders.
To me, that's what its all about...
See how they like it vice versa, capice?
I think not. :D
Start alienating groups and the opinions start to become no more unbiased than marketing spin...
And who said Digg wasn't biased in the first place? People post articles of interest which pretty often have an obvious political slant (take all the anti-Bush stuff, for example). Eliminating the people who think that they're entitled to do whatever they want and have the owners of the site deal with the consequences of their actions isn't a problem in my eyes.
Anti-Bush stuff is popular because the boy is a horse's ass and is funny to watch when the tele-prompter breaks and there's nobody to pull his strings...
Digg is biased, but biased toward the general concensus of the majority.