Earlier this evening, I navigated to the popular digg.com website earlier to see what was buzzing around the Internet tonight. I was quite surprised to find that there were few, if any, legitimate stories on the front page. Every story was a posting of the (fairly) recently discovered key to “crack” the encryption of the AACS Digital Rights Management content protection system. It’s a string of 16 hexidecimal numbers, a total of 128 binary digits. I won’t publish them here, as it is a criminal act, or at least something that will get you served with a DMCA takedown notice and threat to sue.

The point here is not the key itself or even that people can use it for piracy now. What is interesting is the huge buzz around the key. The lack of any legitimate digg stories rising to the top, the edit-locked Wikipedia articles, and the mass of blog posts suddenly containing nothing but the key are the interesting part. While the crack was discovered back in February, there were no real problems until today. Suddenly, it’s all anyone can talk about (see this digg story). What was the tipping point in this story?

To me, it appears to be one or two stories that were linked to on the Digg page earlier today (here and here) that deal with censorship. Digg users have risen up before about censorship, so it seems like it’s a rather important issue to them. Soon after, many stories were submitted to Digg and apparently deleted as well (see here). This was the tipping point. Once possible, users submitted as many stories as possible, and dozens of them populated and filled the front page in barely any time at all.

Who knows what the page will look like tomorrow morning; perhaps they’ll all be deleted, or perhaps it will fade into obscurity. In any case, for a short time, this was all anyone on the Internet could talk about, and this showcases the effects of bandwagons. So few of the users could really care about the code; they won’t be the ones to use it, as it does not do anything for a layperson. As one of the linked Digg stories says, “the processing key is only useful for sophisticated programmers capable of writing software to rip and decrypt the discs, much like how a blue-print drawing of a door key is not sufficient to unlock a door without an engineer first making a physical key based on it.” Yet for something that seemingly should be important to every digger, they all join the cause, be it illegal or not.

It’s just another example of how bandwagons can get out of control, and end up as bad as a mob.