Check out the front page of digg.com for a very interesting, and possibly unprecedented phenomenon: a very popular site's users are in open rebellion against the site's administrators over censorship. For those who don't know, digg operates off of a voting principle, the more people vote for an article, the better a chance it has off appearing on the front page. To incite the current debaucle, it seems that a string that can be used to break the copy protection on HD-DVDs was been released. This ticked off the HD-DVD people, causing them to send takedown notices to all sites hosting the key, including digg, which reset the "digg counts" of all articles containing the code.

Problem was, people noticed, got pissed at being censored over a number, and now the site contains nothing but articles containing the code, as users post, digg and comment on the articles faster than admins can take them down. To me, the incident seems a very powerful illustration of how strong the Web 2.0 effect is these days, especially in the face of censorship and an established industry opponent (in this case, the MPAA). Right now it seems that information wants to be more free than ever before. The fallout from this will be very interesting to watch.

Also, none of this bodes well for any kind of control over nanotechnology. Better bring on quantum cryptography!