Special guest: Digg's Jay Adelson and Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann

 

In this episode, Jason speaks candidly with Jay and Fred regarding the recent DRM snafu.

 

Download:

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contact: cast at calacanis.com

 

Further reading:

Danny Sulivan - Digg Gives In To User Revolt; Are Those DMCA Takedown Notices Even Valid?

Micheal Arrington - Digg Surrenders to Mob

Om Malik - A Very Angry Digg Nation

Staci D. Kramer - Digging Into And Out Of A Hole-And Maybe Back In Again

 

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Transcript:

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TYLER:-- This episode of the CalacanisCast is sponsored by Godaddy and PodTech.net

 

JASON: Welcome everybody to another episode of CalacanisCast, this is CalacanisCast #26. I’ve been away for a couple of weeks. Barcelona, D.C., New York, Provost, World Tour… Project X continues, the speculation is getting wild now. Project X. Wow we put together an incredible show today, this is a really interesting topic. Today we’re going to talk about the DMCA, DIGG, the whole HD/DVD controversy, the revolt and everything, and I can’t believe it, but somehow you got Jay Adelson from DIGG on the phone.

 

TYLER: Yep, is he there?

 

JAY: I’m here.

 

JASON: So Jay, you’ve had an interesting week.

 

JAY: Yes and an exhausting one.

 

JASON: What’s the deal. I’m on a mailing list with Kevin Rose and he’s like “I haven’t slept in three days”!

 

JAY: Yeah, it’s been like that. It’s been crazy.

 

JASON: So, for the users who don’t know, last week somebody hacked the HD-DVD codec or whatever it is, the security system the DRM and decided they would start posting this whatever digit number all over the web and of course DIGG being the largest and lets say most vocal, most active technology community on the web hands down at this point I think, much bigger that Slashdot, of course was involved in the story and they started posting like crazy, this number, and this number this key whatever it is of course is some people believe illegal to post and DIGG is an un-moderated or semi-moderated community… you can get into that… And it basically took over the first couple of pages of the homepage. Is that basically an accurate description of what happens last week?

 

JAY: That’s pretty much the idea, I mean but the actually key which was discovered and I have no idea how it was discovered has actually been in circulation for several months, actually since December, that I know of and probably before that. It’s actually been on DIGG before, and that’s when we got Cease and Desist was the last time that this sort of news this happened. And so from our perspective at DIGG, we kind of took this perspective that you know we don’t really treat any two articles differently and if somebody does violate our terms of use and we got a C&D, we would just by default, remove it to protect ourselves, just sort of take the safe way out. This particular case kind of bothered us, because we saw it as a number and we saw it as you know we though it was public domain to begin with, but we did it anyway in the morning, thinking that everything would be just dandy and then well, you know the users, you said they filled the homepage. To give you an idea, we were getting two submissions a second of these keys to the point where DIGG was basically rendered a, you know, just a platform for these individuals who wanted to make it known. It probably was less about the key and more about the point where they just felt that DIGG was a great platform for freedom-of-speech and they wanted it clear to the planet that they controlled that platform, which they quite clearly showed they did.

 

JASON: So now I guess the question for me is, you know, you guys are business, you’ve raised a couple of rounds of venture capital you’re a professional CEO whose run a bunch of companies before, you guys got legal advice obviously don’t put the company at risk, you guys came out an say eh we’re gonna put the number up there anyway and I guess Kevin’s line was if they sue us and we go under, we go under, whatever, I don’t know the exact line. What was the conversation like with the lawyers and between you and Kevin, this seems like a really small thing to go to bat for, I mean, you’re a pretty seasoned CEO. What was your thinking when, I assume, Kevin said I want the community to make the decision?

 

JAY: Well the conversation was an all day thing with me and Kevin and the whole group. It started with us saying, you know, if we hadn’t pulled this down the first place, we wouldn’t have this problem and this key would probably be circulated a lot less, and you know as the day went on and it became more and more intense and it became pretty clear where the community was, our first instinct was look we are the community, DIGG is really a representative of this group of people and it would be inappropriate to ignore that. Forget the topic, for a minute, just be inappropriate to ignore that at this level of volume. But then secondly, yeah, I mean we were talking to attorneys all day and they were saying listen, the safe thing… forget whether… don’t ask the question… Folks at EFF can ask the question. Don’t try to answer the question today as to if this is illegal or legal. Take the easy road, and just, you know that’s the advice they gave us. But when it came time that we decided, probably was about, I don’t know like 8pm Pacific, we said you know this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna support the users on this. Then the attorneys sort of changed - their job changed - because then it became okay well now we are asking the legitimate question and we have to prepare ourselves and hopefully they wont file suit …

 

JASON: So corporate question, you’re the CEO making a big decision like this. Is this something you’re going to the board with like saying Board we’re making this decision or do you just like say I’m gonna do it I’m the CEO I’m gonna make the call…?

 

JAY: Well you know at this point normally I would say yes if you had time. At this point remember DIGG is essentially rendered inoperative, so I’m looking at a situation where should I consider DIGG gone today… possibly forever? Or should I take the risk and maybe later on in a court battle I could lose this.

 

JASON: So question for you. Could somebody post a story with the headline of, like, you know, F___ this person or you know something like that like use curse words in the headline of the story or does that automatically get filtered out?

 

JAY: Um, it I guess the answer is: mostly not, you know if there’s curse words in the title well it’ll probably get buried almost immediately and one of our terms-of-use moderators notices that. It could be deleted because it is against our terms of use. It almost never happens. The more common thing is someone posts something racist or pornography…

 

JASON: So somebody would post the N word on the site, does the filter automatically take that out or it has to be turned of by an administrator?

 

JAY: There’s a little of both, well there’s three things. There’s profanity filters, lots of stuff in there that people can opt in or out, but in general what will happen is because we’re obviously not moderating and watching everything that goes by, we’ll get a complaint almost immediately at which point we’ll say that’s a violation of terms-of-use and we’ll delete the post.

 

JASON: Just so you know where I’m going with this, which is…

 

JAY: That moderation.

 

JASON: I mean, I’m assuming that if you wanted to you could take the key put it into the bad word filter or something like that and anytime anybody submits it, just give them a nice gentle message that says hey, you know, this is Kevin Rose, I’m really sorry but our attorneys have told us that this key is illegal to publish and while we don’t want to fold to the corporate interests blah blah blah we have to respect copyright law or trademark law this falls under, we’ll get ___ from EFF just to check it on that, but didn’t that come up as like a possible solution? Like we can take back the homepage pretty quickly if anytime anybody submits that number it just goes into a black hole.

 

JAY: Well to be honest with you, we tried it.

 

JASON: Really?

 

JAY: Yeah the problem is, and this is not the first time we’ve had incidents where people repeatedly posting things, problem is look at the audience here that we’re talking about who are posting this. They picked up a guitar and sang the code into a video file posted to YouTube and submitted that! They were posting on binary versions of the code, there comes a point when, you know, they’re going to be submitting those Jpegs to Flickr and submitting pointers to that with the title of the story being like a political title or something.

 

JASON: So, yeah, you can fight it the battle, you with the battle but you’re not gonna win the war with the users. Also on the phone we have Fred Van Lohman who is the senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation commonly referred to as the EFF and everybody knows their website is EFF.org, Fred thank you for taking the time to be on CalacanisCast are the there?

 

FRED: Yeah I’m here and it’s a great pleasure and it was great to hear Jay describe that. Frankly that’s a better description than I’ve heard most of the press give.

 

JASON: Yeah, that’s what we’re doing here we just intermediate the press and go right to the source here on CalacanisCast, so Fred, you immediately picked up this story and wrote what I would say is a position paper, or a backgrounder, or what was the paper you wrote and what’s your legal sort of view of what’s going on here?

 

FRED: Well, what I put up yesterday was a really a backgrounder on sort of what the legal issues are. I wouldn’t call it a position paper, I actually don’t know, if the AACS-LA were to sue DIGG over publication of the key, I frankly don’t know what the outcome of that lawsuit would be and I’m not sure anybody could say with any certainty so I basically laid out what the basic legal issues would look like if it did go to court. From my perspective though I believe it would be incredibly foolhearty for ACSLA to sue DIGG at this point after all it was there lawyer letters that actually elevated this from a relatively minor sort of techno story on places like EnGadget and Slashdot and turned it into a real kind of nation-wide New York Times front page news kind of story and frankly I think they have done a big disservice to themselves if they wanted to keep the key secret they did precisely the wrong thing.

 

JASON: So just for background, the AACS-LA is of course the “Advanced Acts of Contents System Licensing Administration and that’s a consortium of Disney, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Warner Brothers, IBM, Toshiba and Sony which creates the DRM, digital rights management, for HD-DVD’s and HD-DVD’s were supposed to be a big part of the solution of piracy because their were such big files of so much better DRM (digital rights management) than DVD’s that would solve a lot of the piracy problem that’s correct Fred?

 

FRED: Yeah, that certainly is what the AACS press release would have you believe, but the reality of course is that the AACSDRM system which is used actually both on blue ray and HD-DVD was promptly broken and as Jay already pointed out, this key, the key in question here actually came out back in December of last year, there have been a number of other keys leaked and other vulnerabilities that have been leaked on Web Pages like ___ and several others so frankly the DRM hasn’t proven to be nearly as secure as the AACS-LA would have hoped.

 

JASON: So lets talk about the specific legal issue here. This is not DMCA take down notice for copyright violations, like somebody stole my content and put it up there, they’re not claiming that this is a piece of copyrighted information. What they’re claiming is posting this number, this key, is that you’re breaking a digital rights system a protection scheme which is the DMCA was (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996) is illegal, is that correct Fred?

 

FRED: That’s almost exactly right. The one wrinkle is that they’re not claiming that the posting of the key actually breaks the DRM: they’re saying that the key itself is a tool that can be used to break DRM and the DMCA forbids both he act of breaking into DRM without permission and also what the law calls trafficking in tools, so in essence the copyright folks will tell you that this is the equivalent of a burglars tool and people are breaking the law by posting it. Or if I say posting and hosting it or linking to it because the law prohibits the trafficking in these tools.

 

FRED: Now there’s a lot of question marks in the law here, number one whether or not this actually is a tool, this is different from DSSS which was the famous piece of software that decrypted DVD’s because it’s not a one button encryption solution. You can have the key and the key alone wont do you any good. You’d have to still go out there and either find or build yourself a piece of software that could make use of it, so millions of people are posting the key but frankly, none of them are able to actually copy HD DVD’s so there are some questions that are still out there about the border between free speech and the DMCA. But certainly ASCS is taking the position, this is a circumvention tool or a component of a circumvention tool at minimum so that’s the basis of which they are going after people.

 

JASON: So now the last time this happened I recall the 2600 ‘zine the ‘Hacker Quarterly’ or whatever it is, run by Emmanual Goldstein New York, those guys got sued and did they lose? Is that correct?

 

FRED: That’s right, that was sort of the last big case that we’ve had and frankly the only big case so far that really addresses a situation similar to this one. That was , as you pointed out, 2600 magazine and they posted the DCSS code that allowed you to have a piece of software that allowed you to encrypt DVD’s - they posted that on their Web Site, they were sued for it by a bunch of movie studios and in the end they lost that case, the court said yes this piece of software is a circumvention tool even though it can be used for legitimate purposes, even though it was posted as part of a news story, it’s still illegal.

 

JASON: And what was the ramification of that lawsuit? Did the 2600 go out of business, did they lose a million dollars? What happened? What was the end of the day result?

 

FRED: At the end of the day the movie studios simply got an injunction which is a legal order commanding the magazine and the website to remove the software and not link to other locations where it could be found. And they could have gone for money or could have gone for damages, but they in fact chose not to and so in the end the magazine didn’t suffer any monetary penalty.

 

JASON: So, of course, unlike the magazine DIGG is a well-funded…

 

JAY: Well, it’s a little bit different problem though, I mean at DIGG we’re not, there’s no editor to control the some frequency of publications. This is a living and breathing real-time user-submitted environment. This modern sort of democratic medium and so the ability or I couldn’t hire enough people to moderate DIGG, it would never be physically within our capability no matter how much money we had.

 

FRED: Right and that’s the other important distinguishing feature of this case, unlike the 2600 case here you have a certain stance where it was the users who actually posted the key and obviously they could try to sue the users individually but the cease and desist letter that was delivered to DIGG that we had that’s extra different distinction that in the case of DIGG and many of the other places where the key has popped up, it wasn’t the website that posted it there - it was users.

 

JASON: Right and so I guess this is this YouTube kind of argument - the message board argument. We’re a common carrier, we’re un-moderated, we do take out notices but since we’re not policing this community we’re not subject to being liable for what they post. Is that your thinking Jay?

 

JAY: Well, you know, I have to be honest with you. We think that there are some capabilities of the site to control. I think that for me to make a statement that says well it’s impossible for me to control or at least try to proactively in good faith stay within the law would be inaccurate. Absolutely we can do that.

 

But what we saw on Tuesday night was how far you can go. In other words, what the limitations of a democratic site can be and in this case it was pretty clear that no technology I could come up with and no amount of people I could’ve hire could’ve solved the problem. I guess the common comparison with copyright violations with something like YouTube, there’s always gonna be that question, could they hire enough people? Could they make a bigger effort. I don’t think there’s any question in this particular situation.

 

JASON: Well I mean if you guys….

 

FRED: I’ve gotta say though, just in fairness to your listeners, this is a debate about what happened on Tuesday. The debate today looks a little bit different because obviously Kevin has actually posted the key himself to the DIGG website and so it started as a question of, can DIGG be held responsible for what the users are doing? Obviously now it is a slightly different question because now the question is DIGG is itself to its own employees leaving this content on the site so you know things have migrated a little bit and that sort of brings us back to my point which is hey at some point the first amendment and free speech have to step forward and say listen posting a string of letters-and-numbers by itself, especially where that is in response to a protest or to make a political statement seems to me to be different from posting a piece of software that lets you ripp DVD’s.

 

JAY: That’s fair. At the time when we made that Blog post, part of our attitude was, this is the one-billionth time this has been posted today.

 

FRED: That’s right and there are hundreds of thousands of other places that’s been posted on the web.

 

JAY: Right and that was just that day. It had been going on for many months as we described so we thought that while in general when you’re small company of 25 people and you’re just in general you’re somewhat risk-averse cause you know you can’t fight the big battles like Viacom-Youtube, Viacom-Google battle. On the flip side, you also try to put some common sense and in this case we had to go with our beliefs on this one and stand by the users or we would have gone down.

 

JASON: Hey Fred. Let me ask you a question. If the New York Times wrote an editorial and said and put the numbers in the paragraph and said it’s been protested this there’s 10,000 t shirts out there, blah blah blah and someone put a banner over the Brooklyn Bridge with the number and our reporter took a picture of it and put it in there… would the New York Times be subject to a lawsuit for taking a picture of somebody wearing the shirt and covering it as a news organization?

 

FRED: Yeah, I think that’s exactly the crux of the question. My answer is no, they shouldn’t be liable. Whether or not a court would view it that way is I think the big question mark. Again we made the argument, yes I’ve served as 2600’s lawyer and DCSS case in New York and we made that basic argument, that the DCSS code was being posted everywhere as a political statement and it was in fact linked to by places like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and you know the court basically ducked that question and said well in this case the software is sort of like a one-button decryption solution, it has both a functional aspect as well as a free expression aspect and so the court sort of ducked the question of could it be the New York Times is liable for printing it. I think the DIGG case is a lot clearer in that regard. As the code itself doesn’t do anything and most of the reason people are posting the code is either to report on it or to protest the sort of DRM use… So I’m hoping the court would say just as the New York Times can print these numbers, so too can DIGG.

 

JASON: Right, so 99... a-thousands 9’ss of the people who have written the code and have commented on it, probably have no idea of to take that code and make it into a piece of cracking software to decrypt an HD-DVD. Let me ask you this Fred, does this basically mean that for the next ten years every time the entertainment industry tries to exert some kind of DRM protection - all hackers have to do is do a protest and wear a thousand T-shirts and march on Washington and blame free speech for stealing peoples intellectual property and breaking their copyright and their scheme for protecting it and breaking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act cause that’s sort of what I guess Hollywood is gonna argue is like now the hackers know the loop hole, the loop hole is do a protest so we’re gonna have people marching over the Brooklyn Bridge with all kinds of decryption code and then they can always hide behind it’s a protest.

 

FRED: Well the big difference is, of course, that DRM is the problem with the DRM the vulnerability of the DRM is not the free speech of the protestors... The vulnerability is that DRM is vulnerable to motivated attackers, so as we said at the beginning here, the DRM involved in both Blue Ray and HD-DVD, that DRM was cracked several months ago and in fact every movie that’s been released in the last four months has been copy-able thanks to the various hacks that have been discovered and so it didn’t require a bunch of code-testers to get that job done and of course once a movie has been decrypted by even one person anywhere in the world, after that, the movie gets distributed on Peer-to-Peer networks and BitTorrent and the rest without any protection at all so the problem here is not free speech. The problem is the DRM is vulnerable and in a Peer to Peer world it doesn’t do you any good.

 

FRED: Now that having been said, the studios they’re effort to try to stop this sort of fix this leak in the bike if you will is to introduce DRM systems that they call renewable so ACX contract to the old DVD encryption is actually designed to be able to be updated, to be patched out in the field, so already they have changed out the keys and they have promised the DVDs that are going to be pressed in coming months will not be vulnerable to attacks based on the key that has already been widely circulated. So they do have something, they have another trick up their sleeve instead of sending lawyer letters to people like DIGG, they should go back to their technological knitting and do the updates if they thing it’s going to work. I don’t think it is, but from my perspective, the free speech isn’t the problem so matter how they slice it.

 

JASON: It’s interesting. The big movie studios and those folks like to make examples it seems in mind of venture-backed companies. They did it to Napster, they actually even sued the Napster investors and board members and executives… They like to come out guns ablazing. Jay, what’s your thinking there? Have you guys received any papers work? Are you guys nervous that they may pierce the corporate vale as they say and go after you individually or your investors your board members?

 

JAY: I really hope they call us first. Theirs been no contact whatsoever and I’m hoping the reason why is because they recognize that the situation really, as we’ve been hearing, doesn’t take them anywhere. Ultimately their goal is to stop that pirating this is not the methodology that’s gonna help them. You know, yeah, it makes me nervous that that could happen. It made me nervous on Tuesday night before we made that post, but the ultimate situation here where we’re talking about threatening the democratization of media in general, you know this is not a situation that’s worth ending the opportunity that we’ve created with this technology. It really bothers me to think that a code, that as we’ve just heard is already obsolete, and on its own not dangerous... It could have such a horrible impact on this “new web”.

 

JASON: So net-net, I mean at the end of the day I know that hearing some buzz about DIGG traffic and registrations up 3X or something during all of this. Do you think cause obviously it’s a venture backed business, venture backed people are in the business to get a return. You guys raised venture because you want to grow the business. Where do you think this leads you cause obviously I ran Netscape inside of a big corporate entity and you know. Try having this conversation Jay with instead of Kevin a bunch of Time Warner and AOL attorneys and I’ve been there and close to this kind of situation. What do you think this is for the long term viability of DIGG as an investment potentially getting bought by Yahoo or Microsoft I know you guys aren’t building into flip but you did raise venture capital which means there has to be exit at some point for those people. Do you think this makes the people like Yahoo and you know Microsoft who might be or NewsCorp who might be a potential inquirer and go oh my god this thing is a powder keg or do you think this makes them say wow this is the future of media?

 

JAY: I honestly believe based on all the conversations I’ve had with large media companies over the last couple of years, the latter. That they of all the potential inquirers of the future, I think what’s common among them is they recognize that there’s a shift in media. They’re all racing to figure out ways to accomplish it. We’ve seen companies like Microsoft and AOL Time-Warner and others start to embrace the users and embrace sort of this democratic ideal, and so I really don’t think that this situation changes that because it’s really more a question back to the earlier discussion of how they’re gonna monetize… You know, Hollywood and that sort of group of property owners are gonna deal with copyright law in the future. That’s separate from this incident, granted, but I think that’s what’s on their mind as a result of this incident and so It’s not going to be a situation, I think, where… and I’ve had the discussion with our investors and our investors are obviously feel the same way I do, which is they’re nervous about having to deal with this. More than anything I think they’re nervous about the distraction a case would cause on this little company.

 

JASON: Yeah but look what happened to Napster. They just became absorbed in this lawsuit they couldn’t even operate, so. I really think it’s cool Jay that you came on the show. I think that you’re a great CEO for the company. You bring a lot of value to it and the fact that you’re willing to actually openly discuss this stuff. I commend you for that. I might have executed slightly different when I was at Netscape, but you know I was inside of a big company and Fred, I really appreciate you coming on the show and you know sharing your view. Have you guys talked before today?

 

JAY: No and I think we’re gonna have to have a beer very soon.

 

FRED: Although I will say I do know Jay’s lawyer quite well.

 

JASON: Fred, EFF tends to, I believe, back non-corporate entities when they’re doing this kind of stuff would the EFF back a DIGG in terms of if DIGG got sued? Is that something they would consider?

 

FRED: Yeah, certainly we would. Our chief goal here is to protect free speech and protect innovation online and venture-backed companies like DIGG are a huge part of that, I mean after all if you look at companies like Myspace and YouTube and DIGG, they are bringing the technology to the table that it’s making all of this new innovative activity possible and so from my perspective an attack against these companies represents and attack against the users and the creative possibilities that the technology unlocks. So we’ve represented StreamCast and the MGM vs. Grokster case, so we don’t have any kind of litmus test against corporations, far from it.

 

JAY: And there’s no case yet. It’s all knock on wood and hope…

 

FRED: Exactly. Let me say it again, I think the AACSLA would be crazy to turn this into a lawsuit. I don’t see how it gets them anything except even more copies of the key being posted in even more places and you know dangling bait and try to even more hackers to go after the new systems.

 

JASON: Where’s this AACS based? Are they in Los Angeles or something do they have an office?

 

FRED: I think they are, they don’t really have employees and such. They really are just a licensing entity so I think they are literally a handful of employees and some lawyers and some letterhead and I think that’s about it, but if you mention their members are all of the biggest IT, CE and content companies in the world.

 

JASON: You gotta think at some point there’s gonna be, I mean it’s kinda crazy to think about if you think about all the substantive stuff people have protested before. The quality etc, against wars etc, but it’s not inconceivable that 10,000 people are gonna show up at one of the AACS’s doorstep or something like that because it seems like this has really become now a point in culture where it’s coming to a head. You get that sense, don’t you Jay?

 

FRED: This is just a lightening rod for a much bigger fight. This isn’t about this code of about DIGG, it’s about I think frustration with the DRM more generally and with the ideas you know people are getting tired of being treated like pirates.

 

JASON: It feels like we’re living in a William Gibson novel or something so, anyway, I know Jay you’ve gotta get back to all your meetings and running your company. Congratulations on all your success and I think you guys are doing a great job. Obviously we’ve had our tic tats before in the past but obviously I’m a huge fan…

 

JAY: I really appreciate it Jason and thanks for putting this together.

 

JASON: Yeah and obviously you have my support and this and everything and I hope that you guys would consider launching DIGG version 19 or whatever you’re up to at the TechCrunch20 conference in September so consider that an invitation you have one of the 20 slots.

 

JAY: We are absolutely considering that.

 

JASON: Okay, well you have to launch something big like you guys come up with that cool presentation stuff. You’ve gotta give me some good features, need talent on that stage. I’m gonna send Kevin a gift basket or something. Tyler take notes, give Kevin a gift basket. Send him some muffin, muffin basket.

 

JAY: You got it Jason.

 

JASON: Fred thanks a lot for coming on the show, I know you’re on the road and you got a lot of stuff going on so anyway that’s CalacanisCast # you’ve done a great job of putting it together. Take care Jay, Take care Fred and we’ll see you next time.

 

JAY: Okay. Thanks talk to you later.

 

JASON: So Tyler, this is the best podcast you put together like on the spot we’ve got to give it some audio and get it out the door immediately. The fact they haven’t talked to each other, we could have just recorded seminal conversation in the history of media and you just captured it, this is the reason I brought you on the CalacanisCast was to get a moment like this and I think this is, I mean, there was also PayPerPost moment, but that was more just soft of funny. This is actually very salient, an incredible moment in history this conversation. What’s your take?

 

TYLER: Well, thank God for the EFF, first of all for the people who don’t know or aren’t familiar what its about now and the role that they might play in all this, they’re playing a very important role in all this and thank God that they even exist first of all.

 

TYLER: And yeah, I mean as Toro is showing, it’s a big deal!

 

JASON: It’s a very big deal and I don’t want to…

 

JASON: Digg’s got my support obviously, but I will say you could, that whole thing about we’re not going to be able to hold it back, that’s true. However, her did sort of say there’s things we can do and I do believe that if you had ten people working on duty and you blocked the IP addresses for people as they posted it and just turned it off for 72 hours their IP address if you block their email address in your register and you blocked their IP as you do it and you filter out the number or any mention of the word HD-DVD or whatever, or you put those things to draw a holding pen. You could actually take care of 90% of the flow coming in.

 

TYLER: Well, it sounds like people don’t think this is going to be even an option. You can turn the site off. I know that sounds crazy.

 

JASON: Weather the storm?

 

TYLER: No just literally turn off your servers, wait.

 

JASON: Well they could also say no submissions that contain the following 50 words.

 

TYLER: I think they did that, they turned of their submission engine.

 

JASON: So I guess that’s the point is they were basically suffering from a denial-of-service attack in a way. Everybody was sending in so many stories. Actually I guess they’re right it would have to end the service, cause the service is predicated on people being ability to comment on the stories, if you turn off the ability to comment on the stories, what do you have left? Nothing!

 

TYLER: In the case of a court case they could say we shut down our site, just to plead, we did everything, we turned down our whole site. What else do you want us to do?

 

JASON: Exactly! I think that’s why they’ve been slowly getting less involved in the moderation of their own site. There were some tit-tats we had back and forth, I was saying people should be transparent about The buries. Every vote, you have to put your name on but the bury you don’t and reason I heard from people inside or whatever was that the staff was burying stories, saying the community was burying the stories and then of course they just say oh the community buried the story about Netscape or you know certain things and I think if they go back to the records and they look at the Bury Brigade it’s going to have a lot of DIGG employees in their burying stuff. So I think it would be a problem, what you should do is flush all their bury votes, flush all their delete all their log files, delete all the backups and start making all the buries public. I think that there’s probably moderation, there has historically been moderation on DIGG. I’m fairly confident on that. I think that’s happened now if they tried to clean up their act, not moderated, but obviously if it’s not moderated the spammers are gonna come on their and you’re not going to keep the spammers from getting buried. It’s interesting.

 

Alright, well this was a great CalacanisCast.

 

Thank you Godaddy!

 

Thank you Podtech!

 

Godaddy, Godaddy, Godaddy!

 

Podtech, Podtech, Podtech.net!

 

We’re also gonna do a thing where we’re gonna start excepting donations and so for a thousand dollars, if you donate a thousand dollars to the Bay Ridge Preparatory School Opportunity Fund: we will give you a plug on the show so I’ll say thank you just like I’m saying right now. So, like PayPerPost wants a commercial I say thank you PayPerPost for donating a thousand dollars just like that to the camera thank you from me and we’ll put their logo right up here.

 

Then I’m gonna also put it in the show notes for that Podcast so I’ll say hey thank you paper post thank you forever DIGG for sponsoring that and giving a thousand dollar donation and I think I’m also gonna do it on Twitter cause Twitter like 2,000 people or whatever on twitter, thank you for this person making the donation. What if we get like five donation a show? It could be a lot of money. 50 shows 250,000 dollars, that could put 5 kids into private school for like, foster kids, you know? Pretty cool. So anyway, look forward to that coming and what else do we have coming up?

 

TYLER: Well now that you’re back we’ve gotta get Perez back on the phone.

 

JASON: Perez Hilton where are you? He says he’s sick. Feel better Perez.

 

TYLER: We had to cancel when you left town.

 

JASON: Project X. Project X. Right Toro, Project X. Good boy. Good to be home! I missed you! Alright take care peace!