NO MERCY - DIGG OUT OF CONTROL

 By 
Pete Cashmore
 on 
NO MERCY - DIGG OUT OF CONTROL
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Digg is imploding today. Literally. The site's million plus users have turned on Digg's management, covering the entire site with an HD-DVD encryption key that the moderators were fighting to remove. You can't even submit a story right now, and frequent 404 errors mean that Digg is actually Digging itself, with too many votes and submissions to handle.

The backstory: a story including the number got to the front page, but was quickly pulled by a moderator. That led to another user reposting the story with the number in the description - "Spread This Number. Again". That story was also pulled, at which point the mob piled in.

Clearly, they've now lost the fight over the key: almost every single story on the homepage, and 100% of the popular stories in the technology section are links to sites that aim to propagate that number. This key, for those who don't know, is a series of numbers which will unlock copy-protected High Definition movies. The MPAA hates this of course, and there's no one Diggers hate more than the MPAA and RIAA. DRM has met its match against a single-minded army numbering more than one million strong.

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