I wake up to a lot of chatter on Twitter about Digg this morning, a riot was on the popular social news aggregation site that a string of hex make to top of the site in so many ways and via so many posts. The admin of digg gives up on pulling them off the site at the end.



It's all started when the HD DVD processing key is posted on the site, but admin remove them (as well as some accounts) and citing these posts are risking the site from potential legal action. At that point, users start to saturate the site with so many links to the key in different way; blog posts, riddle, Chinese cookies, song on youtube, and all you can think of. For a period of time, the site is reported fully occupied by the information. After considertation, digg decided not to delete these posts any more.

I still don't understand why some people never learn:
- Any form of DRM has proved a failure and cracked eventually. As long as there is a way to convert the encrypted data to my movie, there is a way to bypass the protection mechanism. We found that since the day when personal computer is born.
- Unless you are in a totalitarian world, any administrative mean of controlling information flow never really work.
- The business model of the old world has changed as we enter a digital information era.

This epicode also show the power of web2.0, particularily the effect of social sharing of information. There are millions of voice on the net and it's powerful when they act as one.

Further reading:
Wikipedia
公民抗命反DVD封鎖熱潮席捲互聯網