There are a lot of numbers that are important to us in our daily lives – our date of birth, our PPS number, our phone number, our friends phone numbers. There are other numbers that are important for technical reasons – pi, i, the charge of an electron, the number of bits in a byte. These are all important numbers in one sense or another. Here’s another one: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
This number is important for a number of reasons, firstly it’s the encryption code used to encrypt HD-DVD’s. This is the code used to prevent casual copying of a HD-DVD. With the right program this number can be used to copy movies that use the new HD-DVD standard. This standard by the way was supposed to incorporate an unbreakable encryption algorithm. But like so many of these claims, the creators were quickly proved wrong.
Secondly it’s important because the group responsible for creating the encryption algorithm tried to have it removed from the Internet. They sent several “cease and desist” letters under the DMCA to websites and blogs to force the owners to remove the number from their website. It seemed that they were getting their way until Digg decided to remove all submissions containing the number from their site.
The problem is that Digg is an immensely popular site, and people noticed, a lot of people noticed. And they responded by posting even more articles and comments containing the number. So many in fact that the site crashed. This may not seem to be all that big a deal, but you have to remember that Digg is a site that is responsible for 1% of all Internet traffic in the US. That’s a huge amount of traffic, and their servers are usually able to handle a huge amount of requests every second. This furore caused the Digg servers to “melt” under the pressure.
After some thought, one of the creators of Digg decided to stop the censorship and let users post the number. This is despite the fact that could face some serious legal ramifications by doing so. By ignoring the DMCA takedown notice, Digg could well be closed down – for good.
Their is one other facet that needs to be taken into account: while Digg may be facing the legal sanctions, it is the oridinary Internet user who has decided that enough is enough. DMCA takedown notices have been roundly despised since they were introduced in the US, and the people have decided that they are no longer willing to be dictated to in this manner. The Internet has become a means to share information. It is an open conduit for the flow of information worldwide.
This does not mean that the Internet should be a haven for criminal activity. There is a lot of unsavoury content on the web, child porn rings, virus toolkits, phishing and scamming sites, sites peddling illegal drugs – all of which should be closed down, and the owners/ administrators sent to jail for a very long time. But when a number becomes the target of so many DMCA takedown notices, things are becoming ridiculous. Remember, that although this number may be used to break the encryption on a HD-DVD, it’s still useless without knowing the algorithm used to encrypt the disk in the first place. There are sites that provide programs that will copy an encrypted HD-DVD disk, but this is not one of them.
So once more, here is the number: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. Post it wherever you can, however you can and to whoever you can. Let’s see the them try to shut down the entire Internet.