After spending billions of pounds and two years developing the stupidly restrictive copy protection system for HDDVD the encryption was broken in a few days by a consumer angry that he couldn’t play back the DVD that he had legitimately paid for in the way that he wanted to.
The key to decrypting every single HD DVD is a short string of hexadecimal numbers namely: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
The AACS promptly sent 7000 takedown notices to people who had even mentioned or linked to the story threatening their favorite action of making ordinary content consumers into criminals.
Digg was a primary target of their ire and their clearly worried management started deleting any posts which included the code. The Digg community reacted by ensuring that every single post on the front page included the code and bloggers worldwide posted the number on their sites a google search shows 1.2 million hits and counting!
To me this is a wonderful thing and shows the web community is willing to stand up and be counted. If we all stand together and say “I am Sparticus” those who want to drain our pockets at the expense of our freedom can’t touch us. The spin doctoring suggests that people who break DRM are criminal fanatics with links to terrorism who want to undermine the foundations of the music and film industries, but this reveals the truth that we are a small but ever growing minority of people who are sick of being told how to use the content that we have legally paid to buy.
See here for the BBCs take on the story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6623331.stm
Or here for the story from Boing Boings Fantastic Cory Doctorow
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/04/aacs_vows_to_fight_p.html