What brought down Revision3's network wasn't the security hole, however. It was MediaDefender's response after Revision3 technicians noticed the breach and shut it down. MediaDefender's servers, in what that company told Louderback was an automated response, started trying to contact Revision3's servers through the now-closed hole. That turned into a flood of traffic that overwhelmed Revision3's network.

MediaDefender has worked for Sony Music, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America to shut down illegal file-sharing networks. But Revision3's use of file sharing for its own content was entirely legal; to the extent its servers pointed to any illegal files, it was only because of MediaDefender's hacking, Louderback tells me.

Revision3 has asked the FBI to investigate MediaDefender's alleged abuses. For years, the music and movie industries have been telling us that sharing files is criminal, and that blocking file-sharing networks is proper. For millions of file-sharing users, it would be quite satisfying to see the opposite proved in court.

Ripped copies of commercial DVDs have replaced screener copies, thanks to early-release DVDs from other world regions. Those DVDs, which skip the special features and image processing that go into American releases, were originally made to sell copies earlier in countries like Russia, where pirated screeners get ripped to DVD and are sold on the street. But by beating the pirates to the punch in the East, distributors helped viewers in the West get high-quality pirated movies before the Academy even got their screeners.

But that's not all the irony! Fear of piracy can also kill a film's Oscar chances. Baio noted in last year's piracy roundup that late and broken screeners probably killed Munich's Oscar shot in 2005, and that Crash won Best Picture after sending screeners to all the voters it could, while Disney took such anti-piracy pains that over a fourth of Academy voters didn't even watch its screeners, and Narnia only won Best Makeup.

Since some studios seem willing to kill their chances at an Oscar just to keep leaks off the Internet, I want to know: How many of you actually pirate movies online?

Glickman says, "The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected." And here I was thinking it was that Hollywood studios, the ones Glickman represents, with everything to lose and nothing to gain by forcing ineffective protections on its products.

ISPs stand on the frontline of the content industry's war on piracy, true. But they'd seem to have little to gain by taking up Glickman's fight — until you consider this: Cable Internet providers like Comcast are already in the TV business. AT&T and Verizon are starting to sell TV subscriptions as fast as they can. Blocking file sharing may generate some ill will among Internet customers — but more than ever, ISPs need friends in Hollywood so they'll have programming to fill their new channels.

This, Anderson said, after the MPAA told him, "We would need somebody like you. We would give you a nice paying job, a house, a car, anything you needed.... if you save Hollywood for us you can become rich and powerful."

After signing the contract, Anderson held up his side of the bargain, guessing at user passwords until he gained access to TorrentSpy's email servers and then forwarding information to the MPAA.

But after Anderson cashed his $15,000 for services rendered, he said he never heard from the MPAA again. Whoops.

Eventually, the attention-starved deviant went to Torrentspy's founder, Justin Bunnell, and confessed. Now Bunnell is suing the MPAA for illegal wiretapping. Anderson, however, faces no legal trouble.

"He took steps to advise us of his wrongdoing and to cooperate. We've made a decision to go after the bigger wrongdoing, the MPAA," Bunnell's attorney, Ira Rothken, told Wired.

We can't wait to see save-the-children-type public service announcements before our porn starts, begging watchers not to pirate the videos like the ridiculous ones we see now before movies showcasing all the people "behind-the-scenes" like gaffers and script editors and the like.

Dear readers, remember: don't pirate pornography. Please, think of the fluffers.

(Photo by Boss Tweed)

Baby Boomers
Hey, in their time, the Boomers did plenty to help the future. They were the first generation raised on TV. They started the sexual revolution and used the first cell phones. They saw the first walk on the moon and one of them is Prince, who is actually from the future.

But the Boomers have turned into their parents, and now they're cramping their children's style. And children are our future, so the Boomers are giving the future cramps. They're putting parental locks on the TV, driving big old inefficient cars, and gumming up the computers of Gen X and Gen Y with e-mail forwards.

They've started diverting all the biotech research money into stuff to make old age last longer and feel better. Which, in fact, is how they might become useful again to the future. We can skip the whole civilizational step of helper robots if the Gen Xers use the Boomers. Get these aging folks on enough meds and they'll turn their social mores back on themselves; it's better than the three laws of robotics. No one gets Social Security payments without seven years of manual labor. Bam! Two problems solved! Next enemy!

The movie industry
Now, the enemy isn't movies themselves. Movies have done a lot for the future, like reminding us that technology can be evil, unless it's used to make expensive special effects. The enemy is the industry that's risen around them, the people who never touch a camera but make all the money from movies.

Why are films literally wasting away in vaults instead of being preserved? Why does it still cost royalties to publicly perform "Happy Birthday"? Why, in fact, is nothing published after 1923 in the public domain? Because the movie industry, desperate to keep its rights over the first appearance of characters like Mickey Mouse (made by Disney, which has pulled in billions by exploiting fairy tales from the public domain), has successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright terms 11 times in the past 40 years.

But that's not all they've done to stop the future from building on the past. The MPAA has also cracked down on copying of movies (even for one's personal use) and bottlenecked movies through a panel of raters. The hegemony keeps moviemakers from bucking the system without getting shut out.

One solution is to sit back and watch box office returns stagnate. This might make studios try even harder to keep control, but a mob of renegades is beating them back by grabbing, copying and spreading movies (often before they make it to DVD). A last solution is to just watch stuff made outside the system like YouTube videos and indie films. (No, it's not all crap; come to think of it, I'd rather watch the worst blond-girl lip-synch than "Kickin' It Old School.")

Much of what goes for the movies goes for music as well, but here the industry is more definitely losing the digital war. Until Apple goaded them, labels refused to release digital music without "digital rights management" that limited, for example, how many computers a user could load a song onto.

The RIAA also just killed internet radio by lobbying to make it damn near impossible to legally play a good stream of music for listeners without going bankrupt. This was all done in the name of protecting works from unauthorized copying. Earth to the RIAA: the protected streaming audio of legit internet radio was already one of the few things keeping some listeners from just downloading the whole album on Bittorrent and Limewire or just grabbing one song at a time from their favorite music blogs. (Pretty much every rock and indie song, for example, makes it onto the Hype Machine.)

As for how the future kills the RIAA: the constant barrage of piracy and industry pressure from digital distributors will force the old models out; cell phone ringtones and commercial licensing (Moby, for example, sold all but one track of his "Play" album before it hit stores) will provide plenty of new ways to make money from music.

Cell providers
Cellular providers make yet another great industry oxymoron. Device makers can't survive in the U.S. without tying themselves to a service provider, but providers want to lock down all the potential features in phones. Thank providers for GPS being so rare on phones; it's an intensive service that most customers may refuse to pay for, so cell companies would rather not implement it. And, of course, there are the two-year contracts that keep people from quickly shifting to the best service.

Even Apple had to pick a provider to ensure that its iPhone actually gets sold. But in doing so, the company helped pry open the business's reluctance to adopt new technologies. For example, a combination of wifi and cellular service in devices like the iPhone (some Windows Mobile devices already have this) will free up communication from slow cell service while shifting some of the bandwidth burden to the thousands of wifi providers scattered across the country.

Of course, for widespread wifi to truly decentralize wireless communication, we'll need to keep the landline phone/cable/internet providers from double-charging users and content/service providers (like Skype) for any significant use of bandwidth.

The government
Despite what the anarchocapitalists of Silicon Valley might believe, you can't really have progress without a government to keep civilization running smoothly. But damn if the government doesn't try to prove those anarchocapitalists wrong by stepping in the way of the future.

Remember all the nasty things the music and movie industries did to freedom of information and innovative digital delivery? They couldn't have done it without the help of the feds. The most heinous attack on innovation is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which made it illegal to get around a copy protection program, to make a tool to do so, or to even attract attention to such a tool. That's why it's theoretically illegal to even link to this number, a key used to decrypt movies on HD-DVD.

Of course, that's just a fraction of the ways the government gets in the way of the future. There's also the reactionary approach to public health: Under the Bush administration, the federal government has blocked aid to countries that fund abortions, teach safe sex behavior other than abstinence, or help sex workers avoid getting and spreading STDs.

The same government is doing its damnedest to prevent us from even having a future, with an aggressive string of policies that could let industry push the world temperature up until sea levels rise and flood our coastal cities.

Wow, we actually get to try solving this one every couple years. Speaking of the next election, I hear Al Gore plans to finally run. His platform: He'll prevent rising sea levels by fighting global warming and by promising never to plunge his ever-expanding body into the ocean.

Web 2.0
Oh, thought this one was a joke, did you? How could the forefront of the tech industry be anti-future? Well when you think about it, what is Web 2.0 really doing for the future? Sure, we got Flickr and whatever, but now we're wallowing in a sea of consumer-generated crap that goes through "indie" and out the other end. The dot-com money's all back in the hands of Google, News Corp, and Yahoo, and the users are working for them for free.

While hype gets wasted on Web 2.0, the real progress is being made in biotech, nanotechnology, and other businesses that require real money. And as putrid as the phrase "Web 3.0" sounds, it could stand for the salvation of the corporatizing Web 2.0. The next edition of the web could reverse all this user generation through decentralized services like OpenID. With everything decentralized, content stays under the power of users and multiple sites, rather than residing on one service like Facebook or YouTube. Of course, before we can make this future, we'll have to figure out how to make boatloads of money from it.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. He's no Bruce Sterling.

Now, every single story on the front page contains the cracked number in some way.

The madness began after not only was the initial story deleted, but the user's account was deleted as well. Other people who submitted stories linking to the number also got their accounts deleted and their sites received takedown notices. Even people who submitted stories about the deleting of other accounts, stories which did not contain the number, also got deleted. That's when things really got bonkers.

Users are hiding the number in all sorts ways. One story claimed that a new Jules Verne manuscript was found, entitled, "09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:... Leagues Under the Sea." Others link to pictures of the number. A new one says Jesus has "the secret key." Others coyly ask, "anyone know what this number is?" Diggers are digging the stories like crazy, trying to keep the number on the front page and thumb their nose at Digg and the MPAA.

Screencap of the chaos, inside...

Fostering internal civil disobedience cements Digg's status as a democratic news site. The question is whether it can endure what it created. Will all the stories get removed? Will all the users that submitted them get banned? Will Kevin Rose get his panties sued off if they don't fully comply with the MPAA's directive? Will people ever understand that trying to ban something on the internet only ends up making it propagate like meth bunnies?!?!

It'll probably be all over by morning, with only a top-ranked Digg story to recap the memories. — BEN POPKEN

RELATED: The New HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Hack: What It Might Mean For Us [Gadget Lab]