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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?
It turns out that the key is the MD5 hash of "SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE"
HD DVD processing key:
9 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
That's not fair! Everyone knows it's okay to distribute any data so long as it's encoded as a hex string!
Call it what it is: a decryption key. It's not okay to distribute just because 'it's a hex string'. You could encode child pornography as a hex string. It's okay to distribute (if it is) because it's just a decryption key. The format is irrelevant.