The Digg fiasco

Posted by steve on May 2, 2007 |

A very interesting thing happened at Digg yesterday. There was public posting of a HD-DVD decryption key, which was very promptly deleted by Digg’s admin. It created a public outrage of Digg users feel like they are being censored, and prompted a reaction that resulted in even more posting of the decryption key, and more posting about the deletion and the censorship that Digg was exercising.

The whole fiasco is summarized at TechCrunch, with the users eventually winning out at the end. Obviously, there was no way that Digg can fight back against their entire user community. It’s a demonstration of how powerful the public voice can be, especially given the proper medium.

The question here, is that if a decryption key can be made into such highly publicized information, then what is the boundary for any information to remain private? Traditionally these type of information are always available, but only through backdoor channels, you always had to “know somebody that knew somebody” and digg around (no pun intended) for these ever-elusive hack. Now a HD-DVD decryption key is out in the wild, what’s a software maker’s right to protect say… their serial numbers?

If everyone posted their Windows Vista serial key, for example, what is Microsoft’s right to protect themselves against a possible outbreak of millions of serial keys being made public, and the ensuing windows activation nightmare?

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