- What: Censorship of a number which is approximatly 1.32562789×10^37.
- Why: The number in question is a processing key for most existing HD-DVD movies, and is helpful in breaking the DRM contained on the discs.
- When: May 1st 2007.
- Where: Digg.com.
- Who: The digg.com staff and well, the AACS Consortium.
- How: Banning users and burrying stories, the usual suspects in censorship.
The Amazing Part:
In a Revolt against the censorship of our poor unsuspecting number friend, diggnation (as they like to be called), used the site’s democratic system to flood the front page with stories containing the censored number. For many hours every front page story was about the number or the controversy (see the image below). In a matter of hours Digg was forced to stop the censorship of its users and stand up for the right of free people to talk about a number (a big win for Mathematicians everywhere).
From my original post:
This is how viral an idea, a numerical constant, can be, there are even You Tube Songs about it. According to cwo655321, on Digg, “all you have to do is point the number towards any hd dvd and it will automatically play.”… Here is an image (censored to protect you) of Digg.com’s front page for posterity:
Ok, so really, its just a number, you can’t copyright a number. Numbers have exactly infinite meanings, no more, no less, well save maybe zero. The number in question is an IPv6 address by virtue that it is exactly 128 bits long (all 128 bit numbers are IPv6 addresses). What else is the number? I wonder how many of my files have this number in them by random chance. I’ll set to work on that.
Update: I was unable to find any files on my system that randomly contained the 128 bits in question in order, I did not complete the search but instead gave up for now because I needed my cpu cycles for more important things like video compression.