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Censoring a Number
Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?
If ever a story deserved to be tagged hex09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 then it's this one. Remember, your tag must start with an alphabetical character, and it takes a lot more tagging than it used to to get up there in lights.
On a serious note, I am the owner of hdkeys.com, and I have felt the full brunt of this censorship. I established the site back when BackupHDDVD was released, and modified the source adding the ability for the program to automatically retrieve volume keys from the site when they were not found in the local key database. In addition, there was a searchable form on the index page where you could lookup keys. At first, I received a DMCA takedown sent to my dedicated host provider (Layered Technologies), demanding that my hosted copy of BackupHDDVD be removed. This demand arrived at the same time Sourceforge received a similar letter. A month or so passed by and I received another letter, this time through my registrar, GoDaddy, demanding that I remove all the volume keys from the site or be sued out of house and home. In addition, the second letter dictated that I must call the law firm and inform them that I have complied. I complied, but did not notify them. The site has been offline since then. As far as I'm concerned, they demanded something of me, it's up to them to confirm that I have complied. So in recap, I've been threatened, strong armed, and intimidated (you should have read those letters), via my webhost and registrar for simply hosting:
A) A textbook implementation of the AACS protocol and
B) Hex strings
Yeah, America rules.
mmm...muffins
The mere fact that geeks regularly cooperate on a massive scale (i'd hazard the only people who cooperate on a larger scale are organised religions) illustrates that we do not lack the social skills necessary for our society.
If they're so upset about people saying what the processing key is, then surely they'd have no problem with saying what it's not.
-- Alastair
Am I the first to post Base64? "CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA"
Or, an even better idea...
If you treat the hex string as a sequence of unsigned big-endian U16s, and then look up the sequence of corresponding words in OSX's password dictionary, you get "edit view phosphor beautified sorcerous crushed kneader deadline".
For extra fun, you can put the number in your user agent string. Since plenty of server logs are public, the number will be in lots of log files all over the place.
In Firefox, you can append a comment to the default existing user-agent string, by visiting about:config and adding a string property with the key general.useragent.extra.firefoxComment
Whatever you put in there is added to the end of the user agent string that is sent with every request your browser makes. Mine is now:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070426 Firefox/2.0.0.3 Version 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640
Thanks to ludwik on digg for the suggestion.