The Shape of Days

We use two words to describe basically the same thing. “Uprising” and “riot” aren’t exactly synonyms, but they’re really close cousins. Like don’t-ask-what-happened-in-the-hay-loft-last-summer cousins.

So what’s the difference? An uprising is a dramatic event — possibly violent, possibly not — in opposition to an injustice. A riot is just unleashed mayhem.

They look a lot alike, especially when seen from a distance. The distinction between them lies in the motives of the people who start them.

This morning there’s a lot of talk out there about a supposed electronic uprising on the Web site Digg last night. Well, I say there’s a lot of talk. It’s confined to a pretty narrow slice of blogs and news sites. You could go all day and never hear about it. But if you stumble across it, be prepared to do some wading, because the shit gets deep.

Here’s the back story: If you have a lot of money, you can go out and buy a thing called an HD-DVD player. HD-DVD players are just like regular DVD players except they play special DVDs with high-definition movies on them. And instead of coming free in your box of Lucky Charms, they cost hundreds upon hundreds of dollars.

Movies sold on HD-DVD — of which there are, like, six to choose from, four of which are porn and one of which is 1986’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash starring Whoopi Goldberg and Stephen Collins — are encrypted to keep just anybody from making copies of them. The amount of information on an HD-DVD — between 15 and 30 gigabytes — makes it seem unlikely that these would be subject to the same epidemic of piracy that’s overwhelmed the music and movie industries, but remember that a college kid with a free high-speed Internet connection and a little patience can steal a whole lot with very little effort.

The secret to encryption lies in a magic number called a key. Let’s say I wanted to tell you how many redcoats are marching over Bunker Hill. I could just send you the number — twelve, let’s say — but then anybody who intercepted it would see that we know there are twelve redcoats marching over Bunker Hill. If we don’t want that, we can agree in advance to add another number — say, five — to the actual number and put the sum in the message. I’d take the real number — twelve — and add five to get seventeen, then write “There are seventeen redcoats marching over Bunker Hill” on a piece of parchment or whatever and send it your way. When you got it, you’d know to subtract the agreed-upon number — five — to get the real number back.

In that example, the number five is called a shared secret. It’s something only you know and I know that allows us to communicate without letting anybody else listen in. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind encryption.

It gets a lot more complicated, of course, but a lot of encryption systems still rely on a shared secret, or something like a shared secret, and if that secret gets out, it’s all over.

Recently the shared secret that enabled HD-DVD encryption got out. It’s a long number, noteworthy on first glance only by the fact that it’s a long number. It’s thirty-eight digits long. But it’s still just a number.

But given an HD-DVD, a computer and that number, a person with a little time and cleverness could decrypt the contents and keep a copy, or share it over the Internet with tens of thousands of people. The first of those lies in a sort of legal grey area right now, but the second one is totally, completely and in every way against the law.

So for a while, the people who make HD-DVDs were pissed and the people who wanted to steal them were gleeful and nobody else in the world gave much of a damn.

Recently somebody posted a link to a Web page about all this to the member-moderated news site Digg. The page thus linked contained a copy of the HD-DVD encryption key. The HD-DVD people sent the proprietors of Digg a letter asking them to remove the material. Once they received that letter, the Digg guys were obligated under the law to look into the matter, and if it looked like the material really was illegal — in this case, the publication of a cryptographic key to let people copy stuff that’s not theirs — to remove it.

So remove it they did.

Last night, the readers of Digg — which, remember, is a self-selected sample of Internet users, so it’s pretty much guaranteed to be filled with obsessives and nutjobs — decided to stage an act of online resistance. They posted story after story after story to the site, all containing the offending encryption key. Now, Digg is highly automated. There’s no human intervention between submitting a story and having it included on the site. In order to make it to the front page, a story has to garner a large number of votes, or a small number of votes in a very short time, or some similar formula like that. So everything between submitting a story and having it appear right under the site masthead is entirely automated.

Of course, there’s human oversight. Stories can be “flagged” by Digg users. If a story accumulates enough “flags” it’s reviewed by an actual human being, and possibly removed or given a warning or disclaimer. But the funnel is narrow. Countless thousands of stories get submitted to Digg every hour. The staff’s capacity for reviewing the submissions is very limited.

Last night, some Digg users decided to overwhelm that capacity by posting more stories to the site than the editors could review. As a result, the Digg front page became saturated with links to and about the material the editors had been legally obligated to remove.

This morning, people are writing about it. Michael Arrington on Techcrunch cited “the power of community” and called it a “revolution.” Grant Robertson writing for Downloadsquad compared the incident on Digg to the Protestant Reformation. Last night, Digg founder Kevin Rose declared that the outlet would no longer comply with the law on this matter, and that “If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.” The shit, as I said in the introduction to this post, is pretty deep.

Go back to the beginning. What’s the difference between an uprising and a riot? In an uprising, ordinary people resort to violence or disorder as their last argument against injustice or tyranny. What happened on Digg had nothing to do with injustice or tyranny. Some people don’t want you to steal their stuff, so they encrypt it. That’s not injustice, and it’s not tyranny. It’s just good sense. Do you put your ATM PIN on a tee shirt and wear it everywhere you go? No, you keep it secret. Because you don’t want people to steal your stuff. What if some kid posted your bank account number and PIN on the Internet? Would you be pissed about it? What if a thousand people posted it? Would that be an uprising, or just online thuggery?

What happened last night wasn’t a revolution, and it wasn’t something to celebrate. It wasn’t really even something to be momentarily amused by then forget, though that’s certainly tempting given the absurdity of it all. If you take a minute to think about it, what happened last night is that a bunch of kids on the playground banded together to beat up another kid, a kid they saw as richer or more powerful or more snotty than them. “The teachers can’t expel us all,” they said, so they put the other kid in the center of a big circle and took turns punching him, then turned out his pockets and took his lunch money.

That’s not an uprising. That’s not even really a riot. It’s a lynching. And for facilitating it, Kevin Rose and his colleagues ought to be ashamed of themselves.

• I blame the bug
• Why I haven’t written about Arafat
• I thought there might be a riot