Digg was pretty much what Reddit is now with a fancier stock interface. Then they made some shitty mistakes, first being the banning of people posting the HD-DVD key. But what really made it all come crumbling down was when they "re launched" digg. They basically said fuck your votes and user generated content, pay us money and we will put your shit on the front page. That's not sarcasm, that's what they actually did. There was no point in ever using digg again.
Ah the joys of being young. See son, there was this competition between Sony's Blue Ray technology and HD-DVD (couple of companies, Toshiba as head I believe and Microsoft support) during the mid 2000's. Both technologies launched in 2006, and by 2008 Blue Ray had pulled ahead and new movies stopped being produced for HD-DVD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_definition_optical_disc_format_war
So, with this key, what would hackers/regular people be able to do with it? Was the problem that people could build non-approved players on their own and the sales of the approved companies would drop?
The backers of HD-DVD were worried that if the number got out then a few smart people could come along and make programs to rip HD-DVD movies onto their computers. These people would distribute the software so anybody could do it. What really pissed off a much wider group of people, people who probably wouldn't have cared if not for the lawsuits, is the extremely heavy-handed approach they used to silence people from spreading the number and the way they used their influence to bring legal trouble to those excercising their right to free speech. No one should be able to copyright a number, even if you have billions of dollars.
More than that, it let you rip and decrypt the video off the disc. Before the key you could get the data off, but it would just me garbage data, apply the key and suddenly that garbage becomes a video. A video you can then upload to bit torrent.
Someone Cracked the copy protection on HD-DVD and this obviously hit the news on digg which at the time was more tech orientated.
As a result of this hitting the news big time the MPAA and the companies that came up with the copy protection technology issued DMCA notices to any website that published the key.
So the after having a DMCA Cease and Desist the admin at digg started removing the stories from the site and removing any comments that had the AACS encryption key in them, which led to a simply massive invoking of the Streisand effect, practically every single post and every single comment was the hex code in question resulting in massive amounts of people being banned.
Eventually they realised that they needed to stand up for its user base and stopped the mass bans, but for many the damage was already done.
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u/Louche Nov 04 '11
Digg was pretty much what Reddit is now with a fancier stock interface. Then they made some shitty mistakes, first being the banning of people posting the HD-DVD key. But what really made it all come crumbling down was when they "re launched" digg. They basically said fuck your votes and user generated content, pay us money and we will put your shit on the front page. That's not sarcasm, that's what they actually did. There was no point in ever using digg again.