A Lot Can Happen in Three Months

On December 1, I packed up a few boxes of my stuff in Seattle to ship it to London. It's now February 19 and I'm going to have to wait at least another week before I see my stuff, making it a good three month lapse. You can read the whole story on my other blog, thanks to the lovely company VIP Relocation, who the Beautiful Competition and I now simply refer to as "those jokes."

One of the things I packed into those boxes was my good old Xbox 360, and one of the other things was an accompanying attachment I purchased as a tax break back when I was working on Microsoft business in Seattle: the HD-DVD Player accessory. In early December Heroes had just come out on HD-DVD (exclusively), things were looking really great for the format, and I was looking forward to getting some good life out of it once I unpacked it here (should it ever arrive.)

Even on January 1, that was a distinct possibility.

Then the following happened:

Warner Bros., one of the major backers of HD-DVD, switched to Blu-Ray exclusively. Blu-ray is the competing HD optical format.

HD-DVD canceled their CES press conference. Ouch.

Paramount defected to Blu-ray shortly thereafter.

Universal hedged its bets and went with Blu-ray too.

My former client announced a fire sale on HD-DVD accessories.

Netflix dropped HD DVD from its lineup, a sad move since aside from Heroes and a copy of Hot Fuzz I never bought one, just got them from Netflix.

So did Wal-Mart. Double-ouch.

Finally, Toshiba, the HD-DVD manufacturer, gave up and pulled the plug.

And to add insult to injury, Gamestop won't give you any money for your HD-DVD stuff anymore - even the Xbox accessory.

Now there's nothing left to do but to tell sad stories of the death of kings.

It's pretty amusing that this all went down while my HD-DVD accessory was locked away on a boat somewhere. This is always the price of early adoption, and I don't think I'll ever make this mistake again. But on the other hand, I liked HD-DVD's menus far better than the Blu-rays I saw, which were basically DVDs with better resolution. The HD-DVDs were just cleaner, they looked more techie. Which may be part of the reason most people didn't like them.

On the other hand, all I'm out is an accessory that cost me $150 for which I got a tax write-off anyway and I did get some serious enjoyment out of for the short span in which I had it. Who knows, maybe it will become a collector's item someday like a Sega CD or a 32x or any other failed add-on video game accessories in the past.

I guess when it finally does get here I can just put it in my collection of old video game crap that I'll use when I have a house again, someday, maybe.

Digg Dugg, Part Deux

When I went to bed last night, Digg was in a state of lockdown - stories being deleted and users being banned. I woke up this morning none the wiser, and was planning on talking about Digg's reaction for a bit.

But then, around 9PM last night, Kevin Rose (Digg's owner) had a change of heart:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

And I'm not really sure what to make of this. It still may be too early for proper analysis, so bear with me if I 180 on this in a couple of days.

Last night, I blogged about the beginning of the kerfluffle, and (in my near-brain-dead state) said that Digg's users were acting like "spoiled children" and wondered if the consequence of too much information is that "that we no longer exercise discretion in the sharing of it." And I still kind of agree with that. I'll be frank: I find Digg's primary user base to be biased and narcissistic. But that is the price of an experiment like Digg, which allows anyone to vote and comment on news stories. Hell, that's the price of any democracy: that the system can and likely will be co-opted by people who are short-sighted regarding the consequences of their actions, who are obsessed with their own personal agendas, and are not necessarily thinking of the survivability of the whole.

I intended to applaud Digg's discretion at cracking down on this story, because the owners of Digg need to exercise their own self-interest (IE, the survivability of the site.) But in retrospect, I think their decision to allow the hex code to be shared is in many ways more true to the spirit of the site they founded. Rose's blog post made clear that the consequences of this action could very well be that the site gets shut down, and if Digg users still want to vote the story with the hex code up, so be it.

However.

There's the other aspect to this story - the information aspect. While Digg may be the focal point of this battle, a Google search for the key (not linked here - I refuse to be a part of this "revolt," even though I may have quietly squirreled away a copy of the key on my thumbdrive) and it returns some 36,000 hits (source: BoingBoing) - as of 9AM PST on May 2. And that number will only grow. The AACS is basically fucked here: the DeCSS DVD key shared circa 1999 was only of interest to a much smaller web-based community. Now, it's literally everywhere, and someone with a dial-up AOL account can have it in seconds (even if they wouldn't know how to put it to use.)

It's simply not possible to put the genie back in the bottle at this point. The question becomes, and it's one I've asked before, at what point does responsibility and discretion kick in?

I don't have time for a proper thought experiment on this, so I'll simply ask the question and let it percolate.

Digg Dugg

I'm browsing through the SA Forums while watching some Futurama reruns, and I come across this thread about something on Digg.

Turns out that earlier today, someone cracked the HD-DVD encryption key. The one that was supposed to be super-secure so that movie studios could prevent piracy on HD-DVDs. And like DeCSS for DVDs, someone posted the key online. And it was on Digg. And then Digg removed the story, and banned the user who posted it for violating his terms of service.

And Digg, being a democratic website full of, well, Internet types, revolted. For the last several hours, all the top stories and many comments have included the key. Digg's blog posted an explanation. Any story not containing the key is being buried.

I've not always been impressed with Digg in the past, but witnessing its possible destruction at the hands of its own overly-self-important users is leaving a sour taste in my mouth. Despite its shortcomings, the theory behind Digg is certainly an honorable one. But its users are showing themselves to be little more than a bunch of spoiled children. And I cannot help but think:

Is this the consequence of too much information, that we no longer exercise discretion in the sharing of it?