Stop Digging!

We have argued before that any attempt to hard code encryption on consumer devices is doomed to failure - there are just far more people out there motivated to crack it, and if it is a static system, once cracked it is open for a long time.

What has been very interesting is when the crack moves out of the hacker sites and onto big eyeball sites like digg, as has just happened with the AACS HD-DVD crack on Linux.

Digg initially took it down when asked, but suffered a user revolt and changed direction and plans to "go down fighting".

This has some interesting implications though......

(i) Blog-scale distribution for cracking means any attempts at DRM / Encryption are doomed...the AACs crack has been around awhile anyway, this just highlighted that it was out there

(ii) Social Network customers are not the same as "Olde Worlde" customers - they clearly have a voice and can potentially own the strategy, and thus need to be managed in different ways (remember Flickr) - this is what interactivity means!

(iii) The other shoe dropping...this sort of thing will scare the holders of rights everywhere....not clear what they will do, but there will be a response.