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Monopolies of the mind: front page
Ideas were inexhaustible and free until people caged them in. It's time we opened the cage.
Downloading is not stealing
Hint: if you get to keep the original, then you can't use the word "steal".
The real problem with patents
Gutierrez also pointed out that any complex product these days, by its very nature, will violate numerous patents from numerous other companies and individuals. Thus, his argument is that we really should focus on mechanisms to avoid lawsuits to allow those products to move forward. Thus, licensing is preferable to lawsuits. That's true, but misses the point. The fact that no complex product can be brought to market without violating numerous patents should be seen as the problem, rather than a truism that is solved through licensing. Let's fix the problem that makes it so difficult for products to get to market without paying a "tax" to other companies, and figure out ways to let companies innovate freely and compete in the marketplace.
Google AdSense has censored me because of the HD-DVD key
Remember the HD-DVD key fiasco? They say no good deed goes unpunished, and ten months after the brouhaha that enraged millions on the Internet, I have received payment in due course -- the suspension of my account:
This is the e-mail they sent me a few hours ago:
Estimado editor:
Al revisar su cuenta, hemos detectado que publica anuncios Google de una
manera que infringe nuestras políticas. Por ejemplo, detectamos
infracciones de las políticas de AdSense en páginas como
http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/30/spread-this-number/.
Según se especifica en las políticas de nuestro programa, los editores de
AdSense no pueden insertar anuncios Google en los sitios involucrados en la
distribución de materiales protegidos por derechos de autor.
En consecuencia, hemos inhabilitado la posibilidad de ofrecer anuncios en
el sitio.
Su cuenta de AdSense sigue activa. No obstante, le recomendamos que revise
las políticas de nuestro programa (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies)
para asegurarse de que todas las páginas restantes cumplen con los
requisitos.
Tenga en cuenta que si sigue infringiendo las políticas, podríamos vernos
obligados a suspender su cuenta.
Atentamente,
El equipo AdSense de Google
This, translating to English (the meaty part only, of course), means:
According to our program's policies, AdSense editors cannot place Google advertisements in sites involved with the distribution of copyright-protected materials.
As I'm in no way involved with distribution of copyright-infringing materials, I replied in the following manner:
Estimados AdSense,
Please correct this situation immediately. The URL:
http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/30/spread-this-number/
contains ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that can be construed as distribution of copyright-protected materials. No one can't claim copyright in a number -- it's a legal impossibiity.
The other hyperlinks link to sites that, under some braindead copyright regimes, may perhaps be construed as assisting copyright infringement, but:
- none are guilty of copyright infringement
- it certainly does NOT mean I'm an infringer (which you accuse me of)
Therefore, your accusation is baseless. Restore my account ASAP.
I have taken the liberty of publishing this letter on my site.
It's simply unbelievable that an event of this magnitude passed them by when it happened (may I remind you that they sold thousands of dollars of ads in that very page), and I see repercussions against me ten months after that. At the very least, it's hypocritical; at its worst, it's an outright mendacious fabrication.
Removal of Ogg Vorbis and Theora from HTML5: an outrageous disaster
Nokia and Apple have privately pushed to give Ogg the noose treatment (and so far succeeded) in HTML5. This destroyed all hope of having free (as in freedom) media embedded in HTML5 in an interoperable way.
I just sent this e-mail to the WHATWG discussion mailing list where HTML5 is being discussed:
From: Manuel Amador To: whatwg@whatwg Subject: Removal off Ogg technology: *preposterous* Allow me to be the voice of the small Web developer -- which I consider to be the foundation of the World Wide Web. In reference to: http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=1142&to=1143 The recent removal of the mention of Ogg in HTML5 and the subsequent replacement of its paragraph with the weasel-worded paragraph that would make Minitrue bust their collective shirt buttons in pride: <p class="big-issue">It would be helpful for interoperability if all+ browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known+ codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is+ known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is+ compatible with the open source development model, that is of+ sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional+ submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue+ and this section will be updated once more information is+ available.</p> is a preposterous and gross mischaracterization of fact (dare I say lie). At the very least, it's FUD. It pains me to state what is and has always been public knowledge, and is being intentionally ignored just to "get the spec published": - The Xiph developers were extremely zealous and almost fiduciarily diligent in researching all possible patent threats to Vorbis technology, and for more than a year they found none -- they even did the research *before* beginning to code, explicitly to avoid submarine patents. I know, because I was subscribed to their mailing list and read status updates of this research, practically at the start of the project. I also know that big-name software houses and media players manufacture products with Vorbis technology, and none of them have been sued. It's been what, seven years now? - The Theora codec has had its patents practically relinquished by On3 with a perpetual royalty-free license. - Ogg and its audio/video codec technologies are the ONLY free software media technologies with implementations widely available on all consumer computing platforms -- from WM codecs to Linux DLLs, passing through the entire range of hardware (floating-point and fixed-point) and OSes. - Without guaranteed Ogg support (whose integration in user agents I think I already established to be sort of a weekend-level junior programmer project at NO COST, due to the ready availability of the technology in all platforms), authors *will be* forced to use patent-encumbered technology. Remember MP3? Well, with HTML5 it's 1997 all over again. Ian, revert. This compromise on basic values is unacceptable, *whatever* the practical reasons you have deemed to compromise for. If you don't revert, you will be giving us independent authors the shaft. And we will remember it forever.
Here's the position paper of the Xiph foundation, the makers of Ogg Vorbis and stewards of all Ogg technology. Let me quote a paragraph from them:
So, how do you make Theora and Vorbis popular? Why, by the very same process that made MP3 so ubiquitous: by using it and by sharing it. Only by advocating the formats will you see interest from the corporations. There is no other way around it. Let me write that one more time: there is no other way around it. Backup your films in Theora. Backup your music in Vorbis. Share podcasts and videocats in these formats. And do not wait for tomorrow; do it now. And by now, I mean yesterday.
There’s a lot of companies out there who do not wish to see Theora and Vorbis succeed, and they don’t even have to make much of an effort to affect them. The masses out there with their expensive iPod toys don’t care about Vorbis or Theora. Most of them don’t even know what they are.
Note that HTML5 in no way required Ogg (as denoted by the word "should" instead of "must" in the earlier draft). Adding this to the fact that there are widely available patent-free implementations of Ogg technology, there is really no excuse for Apple and Nokia to say that they couldn't in good faith implement HTML5 as previously formulated. Throw your own theory here: DRM, proprietary control, et cetera.
The WHATWG had an opportunity here to eliminate the plugin morass (so 90's) in favor of a baseline format that each browser could implement. Just as HTML specifiedhinted at baseline formats for images (GIF and PNG), this should have been an opportunity to suggest or even specify baseline free audio and video. And there's still a chance.
Please, please help this issue get more public scrutiny. But if you're going to exert pressure on the WHATWG, be reasonable -- read the archives first!. And don't let special interests kill computing for all -- now it's time to take a stand!
Update: the discussion at the WHATWG list is centering around the fact that Microsoft, Nokia and Apple disagree on having Ogg technology mentioned on the spec, due (I loosely quote them) to the potential threat that submarine patents may pose. My personal opinion is that you don't get any freer than Ogg, and there is no such patent threat because major hardware and software players (gaming companies and America Online / Winamp, for example) have already shipped at least Ogg Vorbis technology in the past. Until this conundrum is resolved, they're taking Ogg technology off the table because they don't want to implement it in their browsers.
Since moving forward with HTML5 is a consensus decision, the thing's just not moving forward until a viable alternative to Ogg is found (or, maybe they can be convinced?). Both Opera and Mozilla have preliminary implementations of in-browser VIDEO tags that play Ogg media. Read the mailing list archives to see the arguments espoused in favor of / against the idea, and read the comments below.
It really bothered me that Nokia referred earlier this week to Ogg as a *proprietary* technology, blatantly stating something so untrue. It also bothers me that Apple has expressed concern against Ogg. Both companies make great products -- my entire life I've only owned Nokia phones, I was thinking about the N800, and it's in no small part thanks to Apple that I have hassle-free Zeroconf networking at home -- but this clearly puts the small content producer at a disadvantage.
I just discovered the position paper that Mozilla, through Chris Double (the author of the VIDEO embedding tag in Mozilla software), will be presenting in a few hours on the W3C video workshop. Interesting read.
On Lawrence Lessig switching 'majors'
Larry,
You've been a source of inspiration for tens of thousands of people (or millions... I think I got the order of magnitude wrong by at least two higher steps). I am infinitely grateful for the two deepest reads I had the chance to enjoy: Code and Culture. Brutally sobering.
I think that, whether consciously or unconsciously, both books already had this "corruption" problem pinned down, even if it just was a general/background theme transpired in the innumerable acts of injustice you exposed/remembered in them.
It's been fairly clear to me for years now that "the system", as it currently stands, is, systemically, the source and ultimate cause of these maladies affecting the world, and actively impedes free culture/software.
Kudos for taking on the monumental task of fighting it, not necessarily to destroy it, but to find the leverage that will allow us to reshape it to serve a new, nobler purpose. I wish you all the best.
Hopefully this trackback goes through -- it's been a while since I've used them for their intended purpose of responding to people.
Say goodbye to the Internet you knew
Because your kids won't ever know it. Don't believe me? Here are the two major turning points, all in one week's news:
Yes, we sold you 6 Mb/s... and we sold the same 6 Mb/s to 50 other idiots
Time Warner, one of the largest cable Internet providers in the United States, is now shaping traffic.
Wait, let me put it in another words, so you understand how majorly abhorrent this event is.
Traffic shaping is a fancy computer term that means your ISP (Internet service provider) is deciding which kind of traffic gets to your computer first. In other words, they are now breaking your Internet connection on purpose.
They say it's because file sharing applications have hogged their networks. And that's true, considering that they've oversold their network by a factor of 50. Yes, they promised X Mb/s to each customer, and now they're backpedaling from that promise. And, of course, they won't start charging you less.
Examples:
- Do you use Internet phones? Time Warner just might decide you should be using regular phones for that, and sell you some. Does your Internet phone sound lousy today?
- Do you use file sharing programs? Forget about it. Most Time Warner subscribers are reporting a 100 times slowdown, nearly to the levels of dial-up access.
- Heavy YouTube user? NetFlix? iTunes? Sorry, you ain't Web browsing, so Time Warner will slow you down.
It's insidious, because they aren't really blocking certain uses of your (already paid for) Internet connection -- they're merely breaking the legs of those things you like to do. Sure they'll work, but they'll work a hundred times slower than before.
So, in practice, your expensive broadband connection now only works well for browsing the Web and using e-mail. Any other use is unavoidably fucked.
You think that's fair? Haha, Big Telco is only beginning, man. Wait till you read about the following event.
Oh, wanna watch that YouTube clip? Copyrighted, sorry!
AT&T (the other big broadband provider in the States) has announced today that they will block copyrighted content in their network.
In other words: unless your use of the Internet is an "approved one", you can forget about actually using it.
You know what that means. No more BitTorrent. No more YouTube. We don't know the true power of their blocking technology, but you can bet it's enough to make you want to go back to dial-up.
One thing we know: their filtering and blocking technology is based on content. This has deep ramifications for the future of the Internet.
"So what?"
Think you can just switch ISPs? That you'll be able to outsmart Big Media and Big Telco? Think again.
This is what is going to happen next:
- Outright censorship. The same type of censorship practiced in totalitarian states like China. AT&T users are already experiencing this type of treatment when they visit sites like The Pirate Bay.
- Massive amounts of lawsuits against Internet users downloading music and movies. Especially now that a law criminalizes "intent to commit copyright infringement".
- ISPs charging "premium" rates for (today's standard) unblocked and unshaped services. Both to consumers (for unrestricted usage) and Web site operators (for content delivery). Don't be surprised if, say, Google slows down dramatically while Yahoo speeds up.
As you can see, they've got the law and the technology to break your legs, then sell you crutches. Big Telco and Big Media have all the bases covered.
Think this is avoidable? Think again.
- Now that two ISPs have taken the plunge, it's only natural that the rest will follow suit.
- This kind of thing always gets exported from the U.S. to the rest of the world.
Yes, it's all a massive Web of deceit, lies, and extortion from two oligopolies, and you, the end user, can go fuck yourself. Oh, yeah, I was forgetting.. these events took place in the very same land of the supposedly free and home of the supposedly brave. Ironic, isn't it?
Today marks an important turning point for the Internet: the information age is over. It was nice while it lasted; your kids will have a field day mocking you when you tell them how the Internet was when you were young.
Net neutrality
Ever wonder what Net neutrality is all about? Here's a hilarious video explaining it:
Storytelling, HD-DVDs and the future of culture
Lessig, in his book Free culture, makes an amazing point:
Technology has thus given us an opportunity to do something with culture that has only ever been possible for individuals in small groups, isolated from others. Think about an old man telling a story to a collection of neighbors in a small town. Now imagine that same storytelling extended across the globe.
Yet all this is possible only if the activity is presumptively legal. In the current regime of legal regulation, it is not.
The way his words, back in 2005, meld into today's cultural climate is astonishingly premonitory; I just read them, and it's like he had written them expressly for me to read. Excuse me, for us to read.
Keep in mind that this book has been available for a couple of years now. If Lessig weren't a famous lawyer, he could very well be a famous psychic.
A tip for you: read the book. It's a fantastic read, peppered with fascinating, true tales. And it's premonitory book -- if you need to know what the cultural climate will be in five years, you absolutely must read it.
Now, back to our concerns. Lessig makes one point very clear: there's reason to be alarmed:
The four students who were threatened by the RIAA ( Jesse Jordan of chapter 3 was just one) were threatened with a $98 billion lawsuit for building search engines that permitted songs to be copied. Yet WorldCom—which defrauded investors of $11 billion, resulting in a loss to investors in market capitalization of over $200 billion—received a fine of a mere $750 million.1 And under legislation being pushed in Congress right now, a doctor who negligently removes the wrong leg in an operation would be liable for no more than $250,000 in damages for pain and suffering.2 Can common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum fine for downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine for a doctor’s negligently butchering a patient?
To make a long story short: Jesse Jordan was flat-out extorted into giving all his money to the record companies. This is not news. Remember, this happened a couple of years ago. Have we completely forgotten about it by now? Because we shouldn't have.
And because we forgot, things keep getting worse. There's a new crime looming over the horizon: attempted copyright infringement.
All things notwithstanding, the message of the book is clear: do you want to live in a world where you'd go to jail and be perpetually broke, without even a shot at a decent future, for sharing a couple of songs, while murderers are simultaneously serving their couple of years and going free? Is this just and balanced punishment? Is doing what everyone has always done (namely, sharing songs, movies, books, culture) meritory of such outrageously draconian measures?
I say no. But I'm only one voice among the monumentally huge mass of "daily lawbreakers". What are you doing to spare yourself and your children? Let your voice be heard too!
Do not use MP3
Play Ogg instead. It sounds better, it's free software, it's just better. If your portable media player doesn't play it, just get a desktop player that transcodes on the fly.
It sounds better
Honest. I've done the comparison myself. An MP3 in its highest quality settings, with the best encoder there is (LAME), still doesn't sound exactly like the original. An Ogg Vorbis file encoded using an average of 130 kbps (quality setting 4.9) is indistinguishable from the original.
I did the tests using an expensive sound card and a very expensive set of Technics headphones. The difference is dramatic.
It's free
Yes, it's free. Free as in free beer. But, more importantly, free as in freedom. You're free to do whatever you want with Ogg. You do not need to pay royalties for software patents. You're not at the mercy of giant corporations
How do I switch?
You don't need to switch your music collection to Ogg. The best course of action is to just rip any new CDs to Ogg directly. The Play Ogg page has more info about it.
If your portable music player doesn't support it, there are countless player managers that will transcode the files into MP3 before saving them to your portable music player. For example: I have a Palm T|X that doesn't support Ogg (it does, but let's pretend it doesn't). Amarok transcodes each Ogg music file into MP3 before saving it to my Palm's memory card. I don't have to do anything -- it's fully automatic!
Boing Boing: EFF explains the law on AACS keys
Fred von Lohmann, expert and attorney at law, lays down the law of the land in relation to the HD-DVD decryption key... and it's disheartening:
This is the law of the land, and it stinks. If there was ever an example of why the DMCA needs to die, this is it. The idea that a sixteen-digit number is illegal to possess, to discuss in class, or to post on a news site is offensive to a country where free speech is the first order of the Constitution. The MPAA and RIAA are conspiring to unmake America, to turn this into a country where free expression, due process, and the rule of law take a back-seat to a perpetual set of governmental handouts intended to guarantee the long-term profitability of a small handful of corrupt companies.
I don't mean to sound pessimistic -- I got Fred to sound pessimistic for me. Anyway, to understand the finer legal points, read the linked article. Von Lohmann answers the following questions brilliantly:
- What is the AACS-LA's argument?
- Who can sue over the posting of the key?
- What about just linking to a place where the key is posted?
- What about the DMCA safe harbors?
- Is the key copyrightable?
For ecuadorians like me, the situation is "just a little bit" harsher, since there's no takedown procedure -- local "intellectual property" law basically says spread a "technological protection circumvention device", go to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
New AACS crack. This one is undefeatable.
Remember the HD-DVD processing key that could be revoked? Well, now we can also get volume keys, for free!
Ars Technica has the scoop:
The latest attack vector bypasses the encryption performed by the Device Keys—the same keys that were revoked by the WinDVD update—and the so-called "Host Private Key," which as yet has not been found. This was accomplished by de-soldering the HD DVD drive's firmware chip, reading its contents, and then patching it. Once that was done, the firmware was soldered back onto the drive.
Despite the technical difficulty of performing this hack, it does offer some advantages in the race to beat AACS copy protection. "They cannot revoke this hack," said forum member arnezami, who has been at the center of much of the AACS cracking recently. "No matter how many Private Host Keys they revoke we will still be able to get Volume IDs using patched xbox 360 HD DVD drives."
This was only to be expected. A hardware-based attack, just like the ones we've seen for modchipping consoles. With such a wide network of stakeholders (media conglomerates, consumer electronics companies, sotware developers), the attack surface was just too wide to expect any kind of security not to be broken -- especially when you're "distributing the baby with the bathwater"... er, wrong analogy, I meant "they keys with the media".
I think the implications of the new crack are fairly clear. We're witnessing DeCSS 2.0: louder, bigger, faster, powered by social media. The simple fact that someone is distributing information on how to crack AACS, out in the open, is enough to convince anyone that the DMCA has outlived its usefulness and no longer scares anyone into submission. This time people aren't shutting up.
It bears repeating that this crack and other HD-DVD hacks are of no consequence for professional pirates -- they do not need to decrypt discs in order to copy them. I hope this time the security community gets this message out loud and clear, instead of shelling up and letting the outrageously absurd mainstream message of "home taping is killing music" run free.
And we'll get to watch HD-DVDs in Linux soon enough. Yeah! I can't wait! But, well, first I should get myself an actual HD-DVD player. Or perhaps torrent a few HD movies ;-).
Want to see this story reach Slashdot? Vote for it in the Firehose!
Ars Technica story URL: New AACS cracks cannot be revoked, says hacker. If you want to follow the aftermath of HD-DVD night around the world, in pictures and videos, here you go.
Stickin' it to the man: the illustrated report of an epic event
If there's anything that can be said about the infamous HD-DVD Nacht and the past 48 hours, let's say they've been hectic. I've documented the entire case from this magazine's point of view -- here's an illustrated account of what happened here and around the Web.
Before I start, I would like to make only one request. If, after reading the story, you like it, please submit it to Digg/Reddit/Slashdot or your favorite site. Remember that I can't (at least on Digg) because I'm persona non grata over there.
Now, let's start.
How the story came to be
So there I was, minding my own business, catching up on my daily feed; then it happened, a new post on Reddit was publicizing the HD-DVD processing code. Yes, Reddit is actually where the leak was first made public.
The fact that the security of HD-DVD's AACS had been compromised progressively was already known -- make no mistake. Volume keys had already been retrieved and were shared samizdat in peer-to-peer networks, along with the software on Doom9.
But this was different. A cease-and-desist letter had been issued to Google, regarding search results that included the key. Not any key, mind you, but the processing key. In theory, with this key, one could decrypt all HD-DVD volumes sold so far, so it was a much bigger deal (and a much more publicized censorship attempt) than just volume keys. A blog (Spooky action at a distance) had been completely nuked because of this.
Many sites were already carrying the key; therefore, never in my wildest dreams I imagined what would happen later on. At that moment, I wrote the (now kind of famous) story named Spread this number, partly because I was angry at Big Media's continuing attempt to screw with our lives, and partly because I knew that the story warranted more attention than just a cease-and-desist.
Yeah, Digg provided the initial push...
And I submitted it to Digg, under my account (RuddO). Or at least I think I did. The submission was named Spread this number. Now.
And I forgot about it.
Usually, stories submitted by oneself don't get very far -- you see, in order for stories not to disappear in Digg's machinery, they need to acquire momentum almost right when they are submitted. My only other story that got somewhere was The coolness factor of Linux.
Then, (if I recall correctly) after half an hour of submitting the story, I couldn't access my site. I just couldn't. Why? It turns out the Digg community had started to vote for the story, at a dramatic pace -- a Digg every three seconds, or so. I found out about this by using apachetop and the Digg This plugin (which incidentally had a bug I had to fix -- thanks, Subversion, for letting me track code changes so cleanly!).
My site was dead, and the story was rising, fast! As a temporary measure (or so I thought) I enabled WP-Cache, and the server returned to normal.
...then Digg messed up. Big time.
I suddenly noticed that the server was running fine, not because of WP-Cache (though it helped) but because I suddenly wasn't getting any more hits from Digg. No more hits (except those from Coral Cache and duggmirror). I visited the story on this site, and I saw an error message on the Digg button. Hell, click on the button, nothing happened. Went over to Digg -- the story couldn't be found. Tried to login... my account was disabled due to abuse!
I immediately emailed the support staff at Digg.
While I was doing that, Rudd-O.com died again. Damnit! Right then, I wanted a bigger server, fast (hey, I still do now!). Checking apachetop yielded a different referrer, and many, many more hits per second -- a new story had been submitted, linked to another Web page; the first or so comment had the address of my story, and dozens of other comments pointed out the fact that my submission was killed.
Exactly then's when the shit started to hit the fan. Mounds and mounds of shit, if I may say. Probably due to a combination of being angry at Digg, wanting to "stick it to the MPAA man", and out of sheer luck, the new submission Spread this number. Again. skyrocketed:
You could literally blink, hit F5 to refresh, and see 30 more votes in the yellow button. I'm not kidding, that's how fast the story was rising.
And that's how fast incoming hits to this site were increasing. I quickly adjusted my WordPress plugin list to exclude several active plugins -- I had to resort to removing read permissions from the files, because I couldn't log in to the WordPress administration panel.
The first traffic wave. Huge.
In a couple of minutes, tens of comments started pouring in my article, and some of them were mentioning the fact that I had been banned (evidently, people were aware of that fact):
Just minutes after that, Digg died a horrible 404 death. All of their pages were nowhere to be found!
Was it an administrative fuckup, or a serious multisystem failure? I don't know, but I do know that, at 21:35, a thousand more votes had been cast:
The resubmitted story breaks all kinds of records on Digg
Damn, damn, damn! Too much blinking, too little time. Note the 4300+ Diggs here, and also note that the story wasn't on Reddit... yet:
At 21:54, my site was already serving an average of 7 requests per second. Oh, yeah, I was watching the Simpsons, and getting ready to watch Shark. Those aren't overlays done in Photoshop or The GIMP -- that's Beryl managing my windows:
At this point, I had two questions:
- How long is the story going to last before they pull it?
- Am I dreaming?
The traffic explosion looks beautiful on video
Just to make sure I wasn't, I "videotaped" the event using xvidcap:
See that big 'cell-like' organism growing? Well, yeah, that's the second Digg submission we're talking about -- it wasn't censored, yet. Check the same event out, but using text only -- notice how large the story title appears:
Stats time. I was flabbergasted. And the site was faltering.
At this point, I decided to take a look at my statistics. The last couple of days had been fairly good, with 3000 or so visits to my interview with Beryl author Quinn Storm. But nothing could prepare me for what I was about to see:
See the chat window named Andrés Santos? He owns Blogsticker (quite the rage in social media a few weeks ago) -- he's a friend of mine, and we were college classmates. Give him a visit.
Meanwhile, Apache was clogged with keepalive requests. It was only ten thirty, and the story was clocking in at 6500+ diggs:
Minutes after, it was at nearly 7000 diggs. The story sure didn't seem like running out of steam. If it was an Unreal character (to steal a commenter's expression) the off voice would have gone Muh muh muh muh muhnster kill, kill, kill...:
Why would they kill the story, without a cease-and-desist? Why was my account missing?
Why was Digg killing the story, when the cease-and-desist already had included the code? More importantly, who could have fucked up so majorly in drafting that cease-and-desist? If I may, the guys who devised the URL trick to embed the code... those are the real geniuses behind the story.
Of course, we now know that HD-DVD sponsored some of Digg's work. Meanwhile, my account was still AWOL (absent without logic):
And the story had climbed to position 1 in the 30-day Top list. Minutes later, magic number 7707 was on the yellow box, and then, 8038. So far, I'm confident we had broken the acceleration record:
Statistics for Rudd-O.com soar sky-high
At this point, it was time to check my stats again. Yeah, I was bored with TV:
Just for kicks, I also watched BloGalaxia, the Latin American blog directory. #20, not bad. How much money had I made with AdSense? Here it is as well:
The Digg story breaks all kinds of records -- for real!
In the meantime, the story was pushing ten thousand diggs, and had floated to page two of the yearly Top stories. Minutes after, it hit the proverbial page one:
Hooray! In under seven hours, from submission time to page one? Wow! Now I was almost positive the story couldn't be killed -- at least not without a cease-and-desist, right? Especially since the swarm had gotten so big:
At this point, I'm speechless. People started sending me screenshots. 10.000 diggs. 11.111 diggs. The digg count reached 12.555:
At this point, I hit the sack.
The second disappearance, the second (and most catastrophic) Digg fuckup.
Ten AM, Tuesday. I move the mouse, hit F5, and discover something extremely odd. Can you figure out what I figured out?
In a couple of hours, the community had propelled the story beyond any established records, yet Digg still managed to get it killed. At the same time, in contrast, Reddit was embracing the story:
Boing Boing picks the story up
While Digg was turning into a shitstorm of highly voted, tongue-in-cheek submissions, related to the famous illegal code... several high-profile, more mainstream sites started picking the story up:
The money was good, but the stats had dropped sharply:
Meanwhile, my site was dying, spiraling out of control. The few requests that managed to get through, couldn't even grab the stylesheet. Even Greg House's wicked behavior couldn't put a smile on my face. Actually, I think he was "mocking my fail":
Del.icio.us to the rescue!
With Digg out of the picture, someone else came to the "rescue" of my ailing server: del.icio.us! Bear in mind, this was four hours after I woke up:
I started to suspect WP-Cache. True enough, for some reason, WP-Cache wasn't using its cache, but generating a new page every time. It might have been due to the volume of the comments in my story -- every time a comment is posted, the page is regenerated again to be served, fresh. Note that I had disabled a couple of plugins already, but basic functionality of the site was there. Slow, but there.
While that stabilized, I wrote up a quick blurb and submitted it to Slashdot.
Slashdotted!
I tend to keep a terminal window running apachetop and check it frequently. Unbelievably, this let me in almost immediately on to the fact that I had been published in Slashdot, at 2:50 PM:
Rudd-O.com was now maxed-out:
It was time to resort to the last weapon in the arsenal of Web serving (beyond, you know, spending more money, which doesn't work for cheapskates like me). Squid!
(Sorry. I'm such a sucker for lolcats!)
I immediately googled for Squid, used smart to install it, and set up a front proxy, then moved Apache to port 81. Don't worry, evil hackers, I firewalled port 81 too. This immediately bumped my requests per second to more than twenty, and freed Apache to serve dynamic pages only:
And it showed up in the stats!
Arr, mates! The Pirate Bay offers their kind assistance!
Three hours after, the Squid referrer log let me in on a "small" new development: The Pirate Bay had linked to my story, smack in the middle of their home page. With a little bit of humor, I might add:
Traffic was now so high that Squid was starting to actually consume more than 1% of CPU. Requests per second? Between 50 and 60. Apache was no longer coping with the demand for dynamic pages, and I was scrambling with the MaxClients setting, between swapping more, or serving fewer clients:
Meanwhile, del.icio.us was showing the story as #1 in their hotlist, and a few hours later, I had climbed to number 6 in Latin America's BloGalaxia:
At this point, all major sites are carrying the story, from one angle or another. There's no stopping now.
But, wait a second... what happened to Digg in the meantime?
Poor Digg. Their "proactive" enforcement of the DMCA turned against them.
Believe it or not, the shit continued to hit the fan all day long over there. In fact, Kevin Rose himself backed down after he could witness the major PR fuckup that had been the killing of both my submission and the subsequent resubmission by the Digg community.
Most people are already calling May 1st. 2007 HD-DVD Night. If you ask me, they're right. Witness for yourself how the Digg front page looked like just a few hours ago. Every single story had something to do, either tongue-in-cheek or directly, with the AACS processing key censorship deal. Every single story (yes, even the "color schemes"):
One more thing left to say: thanks, immense thanks to everyone who participated
And this is where I sign off. But, before hitting the sack, let me show you a beautiful Beryl scale-powered screenshot, showing all the major sites that carried this story in their front pages:
Thanks, guys, for sticking together and showing the world how wrong and greedy the movie studios were. Thanks for linking to my site. Thanks for defending moral values over profit. Thanks for pitching in and trying to change the world, even if it's only one processing key at a time.
DRM is wrong and is immoral. Censorship in the name of DRM is even more wrong.
But, most importantly, yesterday we stuck it to the man
Spread this number
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. Wanna know what's so important about it?
Things are getting worse. We're now being reamed by the proposal for a new crime: attempted copyright infringement. Read this to learn about it and other dangers to culture, then Digg that story. And here's a detailed, illustrated account of HD-DVD night, as seen from the perspective of this weblog and the major technology news sites.
The movie industry is threatening Spooky Action at a Distance for publishing that number, specifically with copyright infringement.
I had no idea a number could be copyrighted.
Anyhow, what is it? From the site:
It’s the HD-DVD Processing Key for most movies released so far. I was not aware that a string of numbers and letters was copyrightable. Perhaps its just my ignorance but it seems that someone is abusing the DMCA again.
This means the (admittedly long) number is precisely the key you need in order to decrypt and watch HD-DVD movies in Linux (oh, okay, maybe software is also required). And the fact that it's out there, spreading like wildfire, is killing the types at the movie studios right now.
Now, even if this number stopped working (and it will, thanks to the revocation procedures in HD-DVD's encryption scheme) or if it were a hoax, the decryption system has already been figured out and is implemented in a software program called BackupHDDVD.
We did it with DVDs and DeCSS, and today I can use my trusty MPlayer to play any DVD movie. We will eventually (rather soon) view HD-DVDs in Linux as well (because the codecs are already there, even if they are illegal in some countries).
Let's show them no amount of DMCA will stop us.
Current events
Oh, do you crave for source code? Let the Doom9 forums answer your prayers. If you'd like an explanation in news format, WIRED may be what you were looking for.
Apologies to Diggers worldwide for the downtime. The traffic storm forced me to turn certain functionality off, yet I'm still seeing more than 40 hits per second at the console. I don't want to sound like a tinfoil hatter, but Digg censored my initial submission and nixed my user account (RuddO). Fortunately, charitable souls posted a new link. The Digg button at the right should work now. Thanks and keep the hits coming.
Alert! Digg.com is issuing 404 Not Found on all of its pages. Please confirm this independently, and keep spreading the word through other means. Everything is back to normal at Digg, but the original story just vanished.
People at the Digg story are suggesting a Googlebomb with the words HD-DVD and BluRay pointing to this story. Do Googlebombs still work?
Digg censored the second story submission again, and all others as well. For the record, the story was censored at around 15700 Diggs, and we suspect it broke several records. Anyway, the story got propelled to Reddit's front page and to Del.icio.us popular, so it's reaching people steadily -- all that's left now is to be Slashdotted. I'll publish an article telling the graphical story later today.
Slashdot got me. Crap. Okay, we were down for 15 minutes, and I had to teach myself Squid to front the immense volume of traffic I was getting. Traffic's still high, but Squid is fronting everything so it's considerably snappier than before.
HD-DVD Key. Thanks for linking to us (us being me)!
The Pirate Bay got me too. Fifty, sixty requests per second. Go, go, go, Squid!
The specs of the server -- and why it slowed down
tobey.rudd-o.com runs on a Xen virtual host that shares a 64-bit processor on one of the North America nodes rented to me by GPLHost. Specs:
- 512 MB RAM. Currently, 70 MB are used from the swap file.
- 1 Mbit uplink. Apparently this has no effect because I'm serving stuff at 2 or 3 Mbit.
- 10 GB disk. Mostly full of log files.
- Complex setup. Three sites powered by Turbocharged WordPress, using a custom Magazine template, accelerated by WP-Cache (see optimization link in the second paragraph), on top of Apache (15 processes, each 20 MB of RSS memory), proxied by Squid (I enslaved him a few hours ago -- but he's feeling juuust fine, he just told me) to avoid the cost of serving static content with Apache.
Contention issues slowed this site down for two days:
- First, it was memory (too many Apache processes), it swapped, so I had to scale back processes.
- Then it was the database (complex queries to lay out the section pages and popular posts in this fully dynamic WordPress template). WP-Cache relieved this problem.
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The second Digg wave required me to turn two plugins that caused additional dynamic objects to be loaded via HTTP (that was easy, a
chmod 000did the trick). Solved (mostly). - Slashdot, Reddit and del.icio.us killed the site again. Now, the problem was CPU: Apache couldn't generate dynamic content fast enough to let other Apache processes serve static content, and, as you know, no stylesheet = no Web page. I had to teach myself Squid fairly quickly and front the site with it.
- The amount of comments in this page. Apache + PHP were maxing out the CPU every time this page was requested (it's dynamic -- cached but dynamic). I temporarily disabled comment display, then got help from eAccelerator through Damien of GPLHost, and that took care of the CPU issues.
Took care of the problems and, apparently, this site is now network-bound, because the CPU looks kinda busy, the load is high (but not due to swapping), and the site went from serving 1.1 requests per second to 55. Hat tip to GPLHost for helping me out.
Tomorrow, I'll publish the exclusive, illustrated (pics, videos) story of the censorship controversy and the struggles to keep this site up for two days. Yes, I've documented the whole process. Subscribe or come back to the front page tomorrow evening.
Jack Valenti is dead!
Ding, dong, the witch is dead.
Slashdot has the news: Slashdot | Jack Valenti, Dead at 85. I'm happy.
Why am I happy that another human being is dead? I'm happy because this man was a bad, backwards man who did the world a disservice by furthering the monopolistic copyright agenda of Big Media -- he worked for the MPAA. Thanks to him and his kind, we have the most draconian copyright regime in Humanity's history. Thanks to him, thousands of people are millions of dollars poorer and indicted for crimes that amount to basically not enriching him and his clique.
I kid you not. His most famous quote is:
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
Yes, he was stupid for not noticing the potential that the VCR had. But he was intentionally evil because his intentions and actions were clear: to kill the Betamax and anything resembling it. And if he had his way, we wouldn't have iPods or any sort of MP3 players today.
He was the kind of man who would gladly strip you of all innovations and freedoms in order to further his only goal: to line his and his buddies' pockets with even more cash.
I'm glad he's dead. Good riddance, corrupt moron. The only thing I'm sorry is that you lasted that long.