UPDATE - Down Goes Digg, Down Goes Digg

This was inevitable. Digg went down 30 seconds after the last post. Let's see what happens. I told Emo that they would do this and they would regret it.


Back up around midnight Pacific.

Digg This - Save the Numbers, Save the World?

Hardly, If you use digg and it has been slow. This is why:

I just wanted to explain what some of you have been noticing around some stories that have been submitted to Digg on the HD DVD encryption key being cracked.

This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.

So digg users went ballistic and posted the hack in almost every single post and comment on the site. digg users say it was about respect.

Was it worth it? Respect is an intangible thing, for sure, certainly not as real and solid as a lot of that venture capital money that you’ve been lusting over, but it was all that your community was built on. Was it worth losing the respect of hundreds of your most passionate members, just to keep a mindlessly idiotic organization off your back? I think you’ll discover rather quickly that it wasn’t, and if this post ends up going MIA from your site, than you can kiss this former member goodbye forever.

This has very little to do with a silly hack, it’s the fact that digg has placed the nonexistent rights of a shill organization over the hard-earned respect of their members. That’s what all the outrage is about!

I understand why people at digg are upset. The site hands over most decisions about what is read and what is not to the user. Deleting the story (while staving off a lawsuit), alienated a lot of people.

So when digg get sued by "The Man". All the users posting will kick in generously to the defense fund, right? They are willing to defend the site that they are revolting against now that they have caved, right?

Probably not. But we'll see.

And no, I am not posting the code here. Why do it when all you have to do to is to go digg and look it up for yourself.

The funny thing: Most people would have no idea what to do with the code once they have it. So if anyone wants to walk me through what this code does, I would appreciate it.