Meewella | Fragments

The Life of P

Strength in Numbers

 
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
 

What is that strange Lost-ian sequence? Does it hold a secret to the destruction of all we know? Do I have the same combination on my luggage? If you ask the MPAA, apparently yes (to the destruction, not the luggage). It is fairly common knowledge that several months ago people cracked one of the HD-DVD processing keys, used to decrypt films distributed on them. It seems the MPAA have launched a massive effort to censor this information as it crops up all over the internet. This may seem ironic to some people since they are in essence trying to censor a number (albeit a hexadecimal one). It began with Digg removing several posts referencing the number which has resulted in open war. Incidentally, t-shirts are now available (not by me).

EDIT: Here are some of the best pictures from the internet revolt.

Meeting Kirsten after her first exam, we ended up chatting over tea with fellow Management student Becky and her boyfriend. He raised the topic of carbon footprints and the irritating glut of information. I would certainly like to control my effect on the environment but referencing it constantly is going result in carbon fatigue whereby I hear about it so much that I don’t want to think about it any more and stop looking at my effect at all. I don’t think I’m alone. Channel 4’s Human Footprint is an interesting idea showing the average person’s lifetime consumption of all sorts of natural and consumer goods. Their impressive Trafalgar Square tea installation garnered particular attention. However showing me a shopping trolley overflowing with a lifetime of carrots is all well and good, but I’m not going to grow those myself, the message some people seem to think we should take away from this. In fact that isn’t even a reason for me to. Society has intentionally divided up tasks and distributed them so that we don’t have to worry about where every individual item comes from. I could calculate the average number of hours of legal services the average person “consumes”, but it certainly doesn’t mean they ought to undergo years of legal training in order to do it themselves. After all, then I wouldn’t have a job or food.

2 Comments

  1. So how does one go about using said number?

  2. This is why it was such a retarded move — the average person can’t really do anything with it at all. However it would allow those with the requisite knowledge to extract the (encrypted) movie data from the discs and decrypt it. They would then have a digital version which could hypothetically be re-encoded and illegally distributed.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

*


"Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has."

(CC) BY-NC 2004-2023 Priyan Meewella

Up ↑