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Digg.com Attempts To Suppress HD-DVD Revolt
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."
Digg took a big hit to their credibility today. They underestimated the outrage caused by the banning of users and removal of stories. Perhaps they'll learn that the site is made by the users. Without diggers, there is no digg.
Hell is other people - Jean-Paul Sartre
The fortune cookie at the bottom of the page reads -
"Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann
Indeed.
Title says all ;-)
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
It's only a partial dupe... The first story was about the HD DVD key getting censored on certain sites, and the second story was about Digg's front page getting trashed because they were one of the sites who was censoring it.
Slashdot deserves a big thumbs-up from the tech community for NOT being one of those sites!
I've been watching this develop tonight, and Digg has gone into meltdown, not so much in the technical sense but in the sense that the user base is in open revolt, posting stories containing the code and commenting on events over...and...over...and over. As quickly as one article is removed, two more appear, and the tone of them is getting angrier and angrier by the hour.
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?
... Oppression of an idea, thought or belief is the best way to get the news spread (see religion). It is the overcommercialisation of an idea which causes it to fade from popularity (see modern day rock music). The best thing that the music industry, or indeed the movie industry could do to stamp out piracy is to ignore it and release a superior product (I am more than willing to pay for a high quality product, provided I can do with it whatever I wish). Currently DRMed digital music and video is an inferior product at a higher price than what "the pirates" are producing, which is why the MAFIAA continue to lose market share to the Coallition of Regular Annonymous Pirates (CRAP).
Excuse me.
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?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yeah, screw Digg! Those bastards, censoring shit, trying to hide things, giving in to "The Man" and the fear of legal battles. Fuck them! Slashdot rules!
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.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
This is NOT censorship.
Incorrect. Censorship is when someone censors 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.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Actually, I was on Digg over a year ago and it was a great tech news site. It's popularity has now killed it, with spammers submitting so many stories and comments that I don't pay much attention any more. Once a site reaches a critical mass, it's only good for advertising as everyone tries to game the system for their financial benefit. I've been coming to slashdot since 97, and the same is true. Same with Google search results. No where near as good as they used to be.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
This is about consumers finally standing up against the bullshit being fed to them by media giants.
No. Those are nerds in their basement who feel safe in the anonymousity of the web who would shit their pants if they tried to stand up for the same issue in real life.
If anything, online petitions are such furor have proven time after time that most (but not all, see Sony rootkin fiasco) of the time, when people complain on the web, nothing happens.
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.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
"The founders of Digg.com - which has been rocked by an unprecedented user revolt over the release of an HD-DVD decryption code - accepted sponsorship from the organization behind HD-DVD last year." hmmm
My little Linux and tech blog
It's pretty crappy, because according to the DMCA, they only have to take down content which they are specifically notified of. There's no way that the MPAA is keeping up with the storm on Digg, so it's got to be the admins being proactive. When you start censoring, you start losing some of the protections that the DMCA affords you. I doubt this will be the end of Digg, but if the MPAA got ballsy enough, they might try to shut the site down, since it's clearly impossible to keep all that user-submitted content off of the front page.
I know, it's sad, but it's not like anyone didn't see it coming. Wikipedia sold out long ago, now the only thing they care about is easy funding (overall) and keeping themselves admins (just about every admin...). None of them are going to speak out because it hurts #1, and hurting #1 hurts #2. The emperor has no clothes, ad nauseum.
So what's the next wiki that's going to take over? Cowboynealpedia?
Great Intellect...
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.
Digg is trying to suppress information that is painted across the internet and can be found by a 3 year old with a simple Google search. I really have no idea what they hope to gain by this. Even if this is because they have HD-DVD ads on their site or they were contacted by a legal entity trying to remove the links all they have done is drawn more attention to it. So Digg has ruined their credibility and further publicized the key..... wow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_the_room
http://www.kubuntu.org/
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 sig is false.
because what the Digg users did to put the number on various posts on the Digg front page is exactly why government monitoring of communications of citizens will never net them the "terr'ists" messages. There are so many low tech ways to encode a message that can be broadcast in broad view of the public and still be coded that the government could spend billions or more man years trying to find them, never mind decode them. Some of those today included:
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Excuse me, but there are companies out there that buy and sell information about you, me and everyone else. Can I go out and have all that information suppressed? That's *my* information, and yet, every supermarket, potential employer, car dealership, hospital, etc., gets to profit and make use about information about ME, and yet, I don't see a dime of that money.
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?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I can't stand it when people throw the "terrorist" label around. No matter what the cause, IMHO it's irresponsible. Period. When bombs start going off, then we can start looking at terrorism as a possible motive. Otherwise, forget it.
Let's all refrain from over hyping this more than it needs to be...
They did no such thing, they used their own computer, own time, own disk.... at no time did they break into anyone's house, computer....
... I own the paper AND the ink, just not the story.
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.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Fark's doing so is not ironic. This sort of thing is normal, to be expected, and other synonyms for "not news." Digg, on the other hand, is "...all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the Digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that's important to you!"
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
I'm the last one to defend the MPAA, but the only reason for sharing this number is so that cheapskates can get free movies. Right?
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.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Right, but this isn't copyrighting. This is a number used in circumvention of "effective copy controls." Lots of people have made this mistake in web publications.
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.
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. 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.
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
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
From the offical Digg blog, "But 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."
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).
No, "cyber-terrorism" is not terrorism. It's a politico-speak term coined as part of a power-grab to rationalize more invasive methods of investigating internet-based crimes.
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.
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.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I guess they are just taking it offline to let things cool down. It appears that they have had a change of heart and will fight the takedown notice.
I find fark's complete lack of even a mention of this issue on its front page quite telling. Fark's strong editorial policy is quite visible on this issue, and it feels like fark is no longer much "fun". And I saw that a fark thread today with a lot of pics that had all pictures removed by a moderator for fear that some might be NSFW. It's not fark, it's nanny.com. But, I've learned a new catch phrase: "You'll get over it."
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.
You know, this is not the first time I have heard someone say something to the effect of, "do whatever you want in your bedroom, but you'd better not suck someone's cock on my lawn/porch/dinner table/cul-de-sac." Who are these gay suburban exhibitionists you people are so afraid of? The only time I ever saw open air fellatio was at the Folsom Street Fair, and that's, well, not a typical setting. I have a bunch of gay friends, and they are all a lot more conservative than, say, the 200 sorority whores I dormed with freshmen year. So just come off it.
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.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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.
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.
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.
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
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Can you copyright a math problem? 'Cos if so, then I own the below.
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.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Beautiful! Kevin of Digg's Response has all the signs of an arrogant businessman who flipped the bird to his users, and was freaked out when they flipped the bird back. He even pulls out the "What about the Children Argument" claiming '(eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.)'. He then goes on to add 'If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.' I mean, how childish. The guy made a bad call, and now he thinks he's Gandhi.
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!
Be careful that you're not simply writing off other people's opinions as propoganda because you don't agree with them. That could make you... eek... a republican.
Fine! Quit locking them up for it. Then we'll shut up. Until that happens you can forget about it. "No justice, no peace"!!!
What?
There's an obvious explanation for the "corporate trolling" -- my generation which was in college when /. became popular, and we graduated from High School and College. Lots of us got recruited at places like Apple, IBM, MS, etc. It's kinda like, you might be able to tell in general when or how someone got broadband by if they use Friendster vs MSN Spaces vs MySpace vs... Or if they use AOL or Hotmail or GMail or MSN or Yahoo.
/. public's interpretation of the FUD that others are spreading. Of course, you might just have the stupid my-company-can-do-no-evil blinders on, too.
/., although many have also moved on. In time, the new popular places for geeks to hang out will be overrun with the next generation of corporate shills and OSS zealots. I've been called both by my friends at different points in time. :)
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
Try "demagogue in general". Fingers-in-ears la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you behavior is certainly not the exclusive province of the right wing. See Black, Lewis and the hypocrisy of the Greens, for instance. "Cars run on cognitive dissonance" indeed.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Wikipedia has a clear purpose/goal, though - namely, to create an encyclopaedia. It's not a democracy, an experiment in free speech, an effort to resist censorship, the EFF, Wikileaks, or anything like that.
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.
butter the donkey
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
and the story-moderation censorship was (presumably) done by a now-disbanded and dishonoured editor (Michael Sims, 'Nazi Editor').
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)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
All you have to do is read the tech articles. Back when ZFS was rumored into Mac OS X the comments at slashdot were insightful, intelligent, and informative.
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.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
geeks to hang out will be overrun with the next generation of corporate shills and OSS zealots. I've been called both by my friends at different points in time. :)
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.
I love the way he's trying to make himself out as some kind of goddamn hero just because his revolting customers forced him to reverse himself on something he never should have done in the first place. Fucking sellout!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yeah, lets blame the guy who was attempting to keep himself from being sued and possibly more for ignoring a cease and desist order! Heaven forbid he try and protect himself and his site from legal action. His nerve in not listening to his users who are protected by anonymity, while he would be the one to bite the bullet!
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.