Maybe it’s just that I’ve been spending too much time following the developments on a mysterious island, but when the story about some secret numbers being leaked out onto the internet appeared, I couldn’t help but wonder what they were going to unlock…

This wasn’t about 4-8-15-16-23-42 though. This time, the number sequence was 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. (They’re hexadecimal numbers- instead of counting ten digits from 0 to 9, hexadecimal counts in sixteen digits, following on from 9 with A,B,C,D,E,F- so the number “F” is actually sixteen, and the number “10″ is actually seventeen. Hexadecimal counting is often used in programming, because of the way computers group “bits” of information in chunks of eight.)

What these numbers unlock isn’t a spiritual mystery though- it was discovered back in February that it unlocks the ability to play encrypted HD-DVD movies on a Linux computer. To stop people from copying and distributing HD-DVD video, these discs are encrypted, so that only “trusted devices” (that is, trusted by the studios selling HD-DVDs) can play them back, but can’t create copies of them. Linux computers are exactly what is meant by an untrusted device, as they are built on the idea that a user should be free to use their computer and the software that runs on it as they wish— and if that means making a copy of something for a backup (which is, at least in some countries, legally considered to be “fair use.”) Apparently, the code was discovered and released by someone who was frustrated to discover that they were unable to play a HD-DVD they had purchased because their monitor- although technically capable of playing high-definition video content did not have the right type of cable that “trusted devices” require.

However, it was on the 1st May that this discovery became an event. When the website Digg.com started deleting posts that referred to the number, an online uproar began about the freedom of speech and the site’s right to censor users posts- to the extent that the site was being spammed with the key so heavily that it was impossible to ignore (and difficult to find unrelated news articles!) A subsequent post on the Digg Blog announced that, despite a cease and desist notice they received, Digg was going to stop burying stories about “the numbers.”

The spread of these numbers on the web (appearing on almost 300,000 pages that Google lists at the time of writing) has been compared to the spread of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, which could not have happened at such speed without the relatively recent invention of the Gutenberg press (which was ironically built to print bibles.)

Ironically, while it’s very easy to find the key, because of the number of blog posts and news stories about it that come from a Google search, it’s slightly harder to find instructions on how to actually use it. So maybe the “system” is working after all…